Whatever Lola Wants

Whatever Lola Wants …

John Maxwell

Most of us tend to think of our environment – if we think of it at all – as simply the natural world in which we live, the trees and flowers around us, the birds, bees butterflies and other living things which we try to tame, exploit or exterminate – whatever fancy strikes us.

Our environment is in reality, a universe of things living and dead or inert, things built and natural as well as the emotional, intellectual and social ambiances in which we must swim to survive. Crime, for instance – like terrorism – is not some abstraction upon which we can wage rhetorical war; it is part of our evironment and usually a symptom of a diseased environment.

The Jamaican Prime Minister, the Most Honorable and Right Honorable (MH&RH) Percival James Patterson, is, with the exception of Fidel Castro, the only head of state or government still in office who signed the Treaty of Rio – Agenda 21 – in Rio de Janeiro 14 years ago. Unlike Castro, the Jamaican leader has paid scant attention to his country's environments, with the result that while Cuba is quite close to fulfilling its Millennium Development Goals, Jamaica is about as far away from doing that as it was when the goals were formulated.

So while most Jamaican citizens, wherever they live, are afraid to go into their front yards or gated parking lots at night, most Cubans feel quite easy strolling hand in hand on the Malecon or wherever in their country they happen to want to stroll at midnight. This week it was announced that the Cabinet has approved a new Town and Country Planning Authority, a group which has broad authority over whatever is planned, built, planted, excavated or otherwise executed anywhere in Jamaica. That, at any rate is the theory.

Disrespecting the Past

In practice, as people all over this country can attest, the Government or its organs, like the Urban Development Corporation,or its friends like Roosevelt Thompson and Robert Cartade, get whatever they want. Thompson and Cartade were the developers who wanted to build houses in Hope Gardens. Foiled in their bid to deface this national treasure, Thompson and Cartade were apparently given, free of cost, land in Long Mountain, Wareika Hill, to build a monstrous gated development which is causing problems for its neighbours in addition to destroying a world-important biodiversity space and the archaeological remains of pre-Colombian aboriginal settlements. The UDC, known to some of us as the Universal Devastation Consortium, has become a private enterprise style property developer, as well as being itself a local planning authority, answerable to no one but itself.

The UDC is on the board of the new Town and Country Planning Authority, (TC&PA)and the Chair person of this authority is the Chairman of the Petroleum Corporation of jamaica, an organisation whose compliance with environmental regulations has not been noteworthy. Most of the other members are representatives of Government agencies. One of the few miscreants missing is the Jamaica Bauxite Authority which has been in a sulk since it was foiled in an attempt to build a PCB incineration facility here some years ago. This of course means that with its TC&PA is in a position, like Judge Alito, to give carte blanche to whichever tyrant is in office.

The government, despite theoretically being bound by the Natural Resources Conservation Authority law, will, like Lola, get what it wants. The MH&RH P.J Patterson, who glides by giving the impression that 'him can't mash ants' as we say in Jamaica, will leave a legacy of official irresponsibility and unaccountability, public frustration and anger. In his svelte, almost invisible progress through Jamaica's recent history, our MH&RH has mashed many ants, not to speak of assorted iguanas, birds, plants and rare and endangered species of all genera, as well as the rights of his constituents.

His most egregious and visible attempt to suppress our rights was his denunciation of the Optional Protocol on Civil and Political Rights, annexed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He tried, but failed to remove Jamaica from the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, because he wanted to dispatch convicted murderers more expeditiously.

His Universal Devastation Consortium, aided and abetted by the National Environmental Protection Agency (successor to the NRCA) and the Town & Country Planning Authority, has mashed up a sizable piece of the natural heritage in Pear Tree River, St Ann, to build hotels which will be destroyed by the next tsunami to hit Jamaica. The UDC is merrily on its way to annexing important public beaches around the island to sell – for whose profit? – to similar misconceived heavy metal developers. It is a record of which Herman Goering could be proud.

But that isn't all. His Ministry of Water, once headed by Dr Karl Blythe, blithely undertook planning to privatise Jamaica's water supplies and at least two of these are already privatised – for what consideration, no one knows. In the meantime, the National Water Commission has disconnected water supplies from people who have paid their bills but have the misfortune to live in areas in which other people do not.

Ms Sharon Hay Webster, MP for the area, defended the NWC's action saying "I don't think people understand that provision of water is a service and if we make sure that people understand that then appropriate standards in the community will be maintained." The NWCD used to say that "Water is Life" Now it claims to have the competence to pull that plug.

Ms Hay Webster did not say how the government was helping to maintain standards in communities abandoned to the dons and 'area leaders' and which get minimal services for the horrendous taxes they pay via GCT. The issue also raises the human rights issue of "collective punishment" forbidden under a host of Declarations and Conventions.

The same malign inattention to planning and community welfare is apparent in the Shaw Park area of Ocho Rios, where the state and private enterprise are profiting hugely from tourism, but have made minimal arrangements to house the people and families drawn there by the same industry. The government's question must be– What right have they to share in the wealth?.

Sabotaging the Future

As the Prime Minister moves ever excruciatingly slowly towards demitting office, he must look back on a record strewn with blasted hopes and wasted popular delusions about the meaning of government. The windfall from Venezuela's generous PetroCaribe arrangements will not go to community development, as was intended, but to saving the bacon of the private developers of the misbegotten Doomsday Highway, otherwise known as the Millennium Highway.

This manic scheme has already had severe environmental effects and threatens even more dangerous disasters. Parts of the highway are, in my unlettered opinion, likely to fail in the same way the dykes (levees) in New Orleans failed, because of the underlying soil conditions. The underlying soil conditions are making life miserable for the hundreds of thousands dumped at Portmore and Greater Portmore, partly because 30 years ago the NRCA insisted that if more houses were to be built in those areas, they should be properly reinforced against liquefaction due to earthquakes. The foundations of these settlements , built on top of unconsolidated alluvium, sand and organic detritus may now ensure that the houses do not sink during liquefaction, but provide no guarantee that they will be habitable afterwards; could you live in the Giddy House at Port Royal, with floors sloping every which way?

Additionally, the foundations make it impossible to grow trees in Greater Portmore. Most plant roots simply cannot penetrate the baselines, and if they did, the water they would reach would be brackish anyway. But Portmore –even measured against the Doomsday Highway, is a greater enormity than any other legacy of the MH&RH. The reason is simple and I personally, warned the government about it nearly thirty years ago, because I had read the Stanley Report on the conditions at Portmore.

The Stanley Report, my copy of which was 'borrowed from me 14 years ago by a top government adviser – would tell them if any cared to read, that the highest point in Portmore is the gas station at Independence City which is a majestic 18 feet – 6 meters – above sea level. What I warned about then, in my capacity as Chairman of the NRCA, was that sea surge from a Category Three hurricane would be at least 20 feet (nearly 7 meters) high and with over-topping waves of at least 11 feet (4 meters) would drown every house in the Portmore developments.

That is why, when Hurricane Allen appeared headed for Portmore in 1980, Richard Thelwell, Franklin McDonald and I dragooned Prime Minister Manley to get him to urge the people of Portmore to get out fast. With his speech, and my effectively capturing the JBC that night, we moved nearly half the population out of harm's way, several hours before we learned that the hurricane had changed course.

As you may imagine, my own personal involvement in and knowledge of these matters does not allow me to be quiet or to ignore the delinquencies of Mr Patterson and his inner circle. They read not, neither do they think and, like the Bourbons of France, they forget nothing and learn nothing. Despite his initial assurances, the mild-mannered man who is 'just like any other ordinary Jamaican' is the most autocratic governor we have had since Sir Arthur Richards was the officially designated British dictator/Governor of this island sixty years ago.

Patterson has meekly taken instruction from the new Colonial authorities at the World Bank and the IMF, with the result that Jamaica's education system is a mess, our economics are worse, and the crime rate is among the most horrendous in the world. Our private sector has fed well at Mr Patterson's table, having been enriched beyond the wildest dreams of any financial monomaniac in the last decade and a half. They have been encouraged to bet against Jamaica, knowing that the Government will always raise interest rates whenever the rich claim to have 'lost confidence' in Jamaica, and, by this simple stratagem, have guaranteed for themselves a totally loss-less version of capitalism, risk-free and unaccountable. And having done that, many still want to avoid the picayune ground rent they pay as income taxes; they want the poorest to pay even more via the poll tax misnamed the General Consumption Tax which weighs disproportionately on them.

We now export, either to the International Financial Institutions or to foreign banks and numbered bank accounts in Cayman and elsewhere, more than 60 cents of every dollar collected as tax in jamaica. As in the days of Henry Morgan and Thomas Modyford, money is Jamaica's chiefest export. Meanwhile, at the University, lecturers are faced with very bright young people who can't speak English and haven't read a book in their entire lives. But we have exacted GCT on books and magazines.

Mr Patterson wants to protect his legacy by leaving it in the hands of one or other of his closest associates, the three Doctors – Phillips, Davies or Blythe. He desires, above all, that he should NOT be succeeded by Portia Simpson, the only one of his ministers who listens to the people and who, unlike the rest, is a woman and a product of the working class.

That wish is something I have dedicated myself to frustrating, with everything in my power. I love Jamaica too much to want Mr Patterson to have his way again. Above all, it is long past time for the people of this country to be taken into account and to manage their own development The alternative is, as far as I can see, is more frustration, more conflict and ultimately, disaster.

If you don't believe me, read about Slipe, a peaceful hamlet in the middle of the Great Morass, read about Brown's Town, a drowsy village in the St Ann hills, read about what happens daily in Jamaican communities.

Then, tell me I am wrong.

Copyright©2006 John Maxwell jonmax@mac.com