THIS ADMINISTRATION is at it again, being part of some grand declaration of intent to clean up the city.
So on Friday, the Local Government and Environment Minister, Dean Peart, joined Kingston's Mayor, Desmond McKenzie, on the broad, imposing steps of the central bank, to tell the citizens of the capital how they intend to make their town attractive. This is to be a six to eight-week project for which there is a budget of $326.6 million, and a plan to beg some paint and to ask the private sector to help in some ill-defined way.
Pardon us for being sceptical. For in the plan, are the seeds of its failure. We have been there before.
Indeed, we all remember former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson's 'Nice 'n' Clean' campaign while he inveighed against the "uglification" of Jamaica. He and, for a time, Mrs. Maxine Henry-Wilson, promised to remove derelict buildings from downtown Kingston, clean up empty lots, cut verges and so on. Such efforts soon run out of steam and are abandoned. Little is ever achieved and the nastiness usually returns with a vengeance.
The precise cause of the past failures, and the likely failure of this latest clean-up, is that they are built around projects, with some specific budget and time frame to achieve particular targets. It is as if cleanliness, decency and self-esteem can be time specific, with periods for start and end.
What this administration appears not to understand, except for a brief period when Mr. Patterson flirted with his 'Values and Attitudes' campaign, before he got tired and gave up, building and deepening human values is a never-ending process that demands a deeper philosophical and humanist outlook. It is more than mouthing phrases about putting people first or balancing people's lives rather than books. It is also more than throwing money at short-term community-based 'bullo work' crash programmes or raiding the national pension fund for capital with which to provide, supposedly, micro-enterprise loans.
In other words, the process is not populist. It requires a strong belief that the little things really matter. So maintaining the place where we supposedly honour our heroes is continuous. Cleaning the drains, cutting the verges and removing the rubbish ought not to be dependent on some special project but the natural order of things. A pristinely clean auto repair can't be deemed too sanitised.
There has to be an understanding, too, that decency and cleanliness have economic spin-offs and that people who live in clean, orderly communities are less likely to engage in anti-social behaviour. But the process means the hard work of continuous engagement, for which this administration appears to lack the gumption.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
