EARLY last year a Joint Consultative Committee on the building industry presented a report to a joint-select committee of Parliament, which was a damning indictment of what pertains in the industry. The Joint Consultative Committee comprises the major players in the building industry; the Incorporated Master Builders, the Jamaica Institute of Architects, the Institute of Quantity Surveyors and the Institution of Engineers.The report said the building sector was in the grip of extortionists, that instructions were given for persons to be placed on the payrolls at building sites and that cost-effectiveness and efficiency were secondary to the need to create jobs for political lackeys.
Since the report with all of the accusations were presented to a joint select committee of Parliament we would have expected that some action would have been taken or that at the very least there would have been some recognition of the severity of the problem.
We were therefore surprised that a year later, this past Sunday, in an exposé on the construction sector this newspaper reported that the situation in the sector has now assumed crisis proportions. Contractors are having to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars to extortionists and that this payment had at times to be factored into the cost of projects.
In this latest report there is the accusation that rejection of the demands of the extortionists can result in death. It cites the case of a truck driver who refused to give in to the demands of the blackmailers and was killed. Even more alarming is the allegation that there were 33 killings which were directly or indirectly associated with the project to widen the Washington Boulevard.
The problem has now assumed islandwide proportions with the police saying that their intelligence is that every building site in St. Catherine is affected with the nefarious practice reaching to the level of small homeowners doing expansion to their premises in Portmore.
It is surprising that a year after a committee revealed the extent of the problem the victims appear resigned to endure the status quo and seem to accept extortion as "a cost of business".
Ridding the country of the scourge of the extortionists must become one of the principal battles in the fight against crime.
