Operation Smash for Cash
IMAGINE YOU have lived in a community for most of your life, and you suddenly hear word to remove yourself, probably dismantle your family, because the neighbourhood is to be modernised. You will just have to move. And go where? You don’t count because you have no title or because your little business is on the sidewalk, and you never even heard about a hawker’s and peddler’s licence.
Or suppose you hear of development coming to your environs, but every provision is being made for offices, businesses and visitors but not for residents.
Well, you feel disrespected and angry. You are unemployed or among the fast-increasing number of working poor. Not that you expected any handouts, just an opportunity to access the basic necessities of life – a home, a job and a peaceful community with reasonably priced supplies of electricity and water. After all, these were the elusive things you hoped for when you voted in elections and paid NHT contributions. Too much to ask in the 56th year of nationhood?
No. Not if we want better family life, successful educational outcomes, less crime; a better prospect than the ‘what-left’ thrown to us at Emancipation.
Yet, this is the real situation faced by almost a million Jamaicans despite the promises of previous governments, including this one, to remedy the condition. It is particularly the case of great unease for the people of Allman Town, Rae Town and Parade Gardens in Kingston.
NO ASSURANCE
The very persons and institutions who are paid and sworn to protect the interest of the most vulnerable now threaten to become their greatest dangers. The mayor of Kingston has announced grand plans for the restoration of downtown, but without detail or assurance as to the thousands who live in the curtilage of the business district.
The Urban Development Corporation and National Housing Trust, despite pledges, have as yet done nothing to deny that there are stateapproved plans to mash down their homes and community all in the cause of somebody else’s prosperity.
Everyone wants urban renewal and can accept, with appropriate sensitisation, that this will involve a measure of adjustment and displacement. But we remember Back-o-Wall and Grass Yard and will not endure a repeat of that cruel discrimination and disregard.
With all the talk about land titling and tenure, the first place it must start is in the inner cities and towns across Jamaica. Idle lands and dead real estate assets cannot provide the foundations of domestic peace and economic advancement.
TOP-DOWN FLAW
Long-awaited city-renewal plans cannot properly be developed in a top-down manner where those most affected, the residents, are allowed to thrive on rumours, insensitive edicts and little, if any, consultation.
This modality betrays a mentality that is infecting Government nowadays: increasingly autocratic, tribal, with plenty chat about partnership that turns out to be hollow and vapid.
This was so evident in the way the application to extend the state of emergency in St James was handled in Parliament last week. For almost seven hours ,we haggled about which side is more sincere and effective in fighting crime and protecting the populace, even as the outcome of the motion was a foregone conclusion.
Pardonable? Hardly, since nary a word on why young men join the dozens of gangs so frighteningly named by Mr Holness, meant to emphasise the grave security risk but scandalously, and inadvertently, exposing the rotten underbelly of St James society without one thought beyond repression to curb that chronic malady.
And if that were not enough to show how clueless our leaders are, there was the cry for partnership across the aisle in one breath, while in the other, the vilifying of the Opposition drew the cheers and scorn of his satraps.
Professor Hyacinth Ellis taught a simple but apparently still unlearned truth some years ago. I hope I am quoting her correctly from memory: “People commit crimes, and it is not until we begin to focus on people will there be any meaningful change in criminality.”
The very persons and institutions who are paid and sworn to protect the interest of the most vulnerable now threaten to become their greatest dangers.