Editorial | Morant Bay, Negril and small things

Morant Bay and Negril are at different ends of Jamaica.

The former is in the east, on the island’s south coast. It is the capital of the parish of St Thomas, which lags the rest of Jamaica in development. People from St Thomas mostly work outside the parish or are farmers.

Negril is a well-known tourist resort town in Jamaica’s far west. It straddles the parishes of Westmoreland and Hanover, as well as lapped by the island’s north shore.

Unlike Negril, Morant Bay doesn’t appear in tourist brochures.

However, as separate articles in this newspaper on Sunday highlighted, the two towns share a problem that is familiar across Jamaica. Both – as the case of Morant Bay resident, Dorey McPherson, attested to, and as several Negril stakeholders made clear – suffer from crumbling infrastructure.

And this newspaper would add the seeming inability of Jamaica’s governments to do small things consistently, and when they do them, get them right.

This is a problem which, as we suggested last week, Prime Minister Andrew Holness must place high on his agenda for correction as he begins his third consecutive term as the country’s leader.

“When guests step outside the hotel, they see a filthy, shabby town,” Negril hotelier, Daniel Grizzle, told The Sunday Gleaner. “We can’t defend that.”

Mr Grizzle, and others of the town’s business community complained of infrequently collected garbage, uncleaned drains and broken sidewalks.

KNOWS A FAIR BIT

Morant Bay’s Ms McPherson knows more than a fair bit about what can happen when sidewalks remain in disrepair.

She is a vendor in the town’s market. One day last December, as she left the market and crossed a covered culvert, its drainage grill gave way. She fell flat on her face, causing substantial injury over her right eye. Her right leg was trapped between the grates. Firefighters had to use power tools to cut her loose.

Ms McPherson was left with injuries to her foot and leg.

There are many cases like Ms McPherson’s that go unreported across Jamaica. Moreover, decrepit buildings, unkempt and unregulated public spaces and unmaintained infrastructure contribute to what the former prime minister, P.J. Patterson, once called the “uglification of Jamaica”.

This newspaper is fully aware of the fiscal constraints (especially the need to achieve high primary balances so as to rapidly reduce the national debt as a proportion of GDP) that contributed to Jamaica’s underinvestment in public infrastructure. Those constraints are now less tight.

The Gleaner however does not believe that fiscal limitations tell the entire story. Another part is the penchant of Jamaican administrations to place their focus on big, shiny initiatives which they hope will stand as monuments to this or that official.

There is in government a permissive of waste and other forms of leakages of public resources, so that taxpayers get little of what they actually pay for. Even the simplest projects, where the primary cost is minimum wage labour, have, on its face, to be outrageously expensive for them to be approved and executed – which seems to be a norm.

Indeed, schemes big or small, appear not to carry performance indicators, or any that are transparent. No one is held accountable for outcomes when they fall short of acceptable norms.

Dr Holness must move sharp to change this approach, which starts with a different orientation towards government and governance.

PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY

This means, first, a commitment to public accountability. Further, it requires, even within the framework of a limited budget, doing the small things that make big differences to people’s lives, such as cleaning drains and gullies, trimming verges and collecting garbage on a reasonably regular timetable. And coordinating the work of government agencies.

It is unfathomable why a trench dug by the National Water Commission (NWC) to repair an underground pipe has to be left unrepaired for weeks or months, waiting for some other agency to do the job. In the meantime, that trench expands into a humongous pothole that creates dangers for pedestrians and motorists. If you are a hapless pedal cyclist in St Elizabeth, you might drown in a pothole after falling off your bicycle on a dark night.

It defies logic, too, that in a society with high rates of motor vehicle crashes and related deaths, median lines and other traffic aids that depend on inexpensive paint and minimum wage labour are not frequently refreshed.

Big refurbishment of the drains in Morant Bay and Negril might have to await greater fiscal space. Notwithstanding, the government can be proactive about repairing obvious breaks in sidewalks and in replacing and resealing drainage grates and manholes. The one in which Ms McPherson’s leg was stuck was known to be faulty for several months.

Neither is regularly applying whitewash to curb walls an expensive exercise, unless there is a deliberate intent to make it so.

These small things make a difference to how communities look and to how residents feel about where they live and about themselves. People who are positive about their communities and more likely to be positive about their neighbours, and thus less likely to engage in antisocial behaviour, which breeds crime.

Doing small things consistently delivers positive returns – socially and economically. Which is good for governments.

Or, as Lenbert Williams, a Negril businessman, said about his community: fix it for Jamaicans and the tourists will come.