Cleaning up a ramshackle society
Recently, the police carried out a clean-up blitz in downtown Kingston aimed at restoring a sense of decency and respectability to that part of the capital. Their efforts were met with some opposition, largely from the vendors who ply their wares on the streets and who saw the police effort as a way of preventing them from “eating a food”. I am in great sympathy with the vendors in wanting to eke out a living in such parlous conditions. It shows their determination to survive and to provide a living for their families.
But I also sympathise with the police who have rightly made the connection between the squalor that exists and the burgeoning crime problem in that part of the city. Indeed, the ramshackle state of downtown has provided the natural habitat in which extortion, drug and gun running and other nefarious activities have thrived. And this has been happening for years, leading to the entrenchment of “donmanism” in downtown Kingston which has now only been partially dismantled with the ending of the Dudus debacle. It is highly questionable whether the police would have been able to go in and make the sweep they did, had the status quo not changed.
A large part of the blame for the decaying social infrastructure in our cities and in every major town (Mandeville not even exempted nowadays) must be laid at the feet of our political leaders. Since Independence they have failed to show the steely resolve and the will necessary to forge lasting change in these areas. They have failed to provide proper vending facilities in which vendors can go to work each morning and feel happy and secure in a clean and sanitary environment. When Mr Seaga was prime minister, he recognised that a clean and sanitary environment would give people a feeling of well-being and would be instrumental in improving their productivity. With this in mind he introduced Metropolitan Parks and Markets and under the leadership of the indefatigable Shirley Williams, tremendous strides were made. But what has now become of our markets and parks? Every major market in Jamaica, with the possible exception of Coronation (which has been refurbished, thanks to Digicel), is in a state of disrepair. Their sanitary condition leaves a lot to be desired. Rat infestation is a serious concern in many of them. Waste water runs in rivulets around them as there is no modern provision for its disposal. The problem is that routine maintenance is not done, and where done is not of the requisite quality for people to have a sense of well-being in an environment where they would be otherwise happy to do their work.
The ramshackle state of affairs that we see in downtown Kingston is just a microcosm of what our beloved country is fast becoming. My colleague, Lloyd B Smith, wrote recently about the ramshackle state of the tourist capital of Jamaica, Montego Bay. I am sure he received a lot of flak for his exposé, most of these muted because of people not possessing the cojones to challenge him to his face or to put their views out for public consumption. In that friendly city, waste water from enterprises runs freely on the streets. Every major building in the city centre is in need of some degree of repair, not to mention even one coat of paint. The recently installed street lights have helped in regulating vehicular and pedestrian traffic but they are proving a challenge to adhere to, especially to motorists.
In Kingston, where the rotting social infrastructure is more resonant, one finds it difficult to understand why in communities that guarantee the longevity of the political representative, people have to live in the squalor and filth depicted in the zinc hovels that have become degrading features of these communities. How can you not feel any shame to be elected for over 20 or 30 years and yet your people, whom you claim to love, have not been offered a cleaner environment in which to live? How dare you go to them and ask them to trust you with their votes when you know year after year that they will not have toilets they can flush, but pit latrines as your legacy to them? Why this great contempt for your constituents’ sense of humanity?
It all boils down to a lack of respect for people; the absence of a sense of compassion and a conscience that is moved to right the wrongs that unfold before our eyes. We are experiencing a particular psychosis in Jamaica which refuses to be cognisant of the worth of human life; which tends to treat human beings as mere refuse to be discarded with dispatch. Any self-respecting government would do something about the ramshackle state of that the country, but one rather suspects that for this to happen there is the urgent need for a collective cleansing of the Jamaican mind. Perhaps we need public group therapy, as Professor Freddie Hickling has opined.
One is going to hear that there is no money to restore social sanity to our public space. We well know the challenges to our fiscal situation but there is a fundamental criminal disconnect seen in a country’s ability to find the money to embark on big capital projects while the poorest among them are forced to live in filth and squalor. If we do not deal creatively with this growing social disconnect we will continue to be a ramshackle society. Then, any talk of developed country status by 2030 will just be poppycock.
Professor Barry Chevannes
Jamaica has lost a great Jamaican in the untimely passing of Professor Barry Chevannes. We will miss him as the great social critic and icon that he was. My sympathies and prayers go out to his family at this time.
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