IT SEEMS every night there is a major drug find on the television news, yet no one is ever apprehended, much less arrested. It always remains a mystery.
Only the other day a van full of bales of compressed ganja for export was conveniently left for the police, neatly parked on a major highway so that it couldn't be overlooked. All that was missing was a love letter.
Who is fooling whom here? Then a container pretending to contain yam for export turned out to have ganja with a US$10 million street value, or J$500 million. If this is the one that didn't get away, I'd hate to think of the other fish in the sea, especially since I don't believe that much of the money even reaches our shores.
An international research body puts the size of the informal economy at $155,904 million, accounting for 43.35 per cent of GDP. Any economist will tell you that this is one of the most dubious measurements, depending upon crude methods of investigation like interviews. It is therefore one of the most unreliable economic estimates in the world.
Nevertheless many Jamaicans privately expressed great surprise that the figure wasn't much higher. Drug money, they say, is the only thing keeping the Jamaican economy afloat. The fact is, however, that the public debt is over 140 per cent of GDP and rising, so that the Jamaican economy is not buoyant, but sinking faster and deeper than anyone could have dreamt possible.
The only things we seem to see from the illegal drug trade are a few people coming into a little money overnight, wrecked outboard engines and go-fast boats, bales of ganja seized, every second person in the society dressed as a private security guard, and an unprecedented amount of violent black-on-black crime in all our towns, which has now been exported to London, U.K. where every second finger on the trigger is that of a Jamaican.
Were there really drug money fuelling the economy, not a single merchant would have had to have a sale at Christmas. Nor would there have been such obvious increases in begging and vagrancy, nor so many sellers without buyers. At best the informal economy is yet another unsolved mystery, like so many of the other unsolved mysteries under the Patterson administration. We have no end of major drug and ammunition finds, but nobody is ever arrested. Law-breakers of high standing are ignored. And of course what the Government does with public funds remains another unsolved mystery. The informal economy may be a myth, but the public debt is not.
Still no word on what caused the $6 billion debt at the Water Commission and written off by the Minister of Finance Dr. Omar Davies. No word yet on the Crime Management Unit and SSP Reneto Adams which had been put under investigation and review by the Police Commissioner. Were they given a clean bill of health?
Nothing out of the Wire-Tapping scandal of 2001 where top political figures were said to be caught on tape in conversations with area dons and drug dealers. All that transpired subsequently was that Jimmy McGregor was dismissed here, but honoured by the Bahamian Government for breaking a drug-smuggling ring. Who is fooling whom here?
In place of law-enforcement, we have had 1,045 murders committed in 2002. Rife with murder, Jamaica's rate of violent death has already surged in 2003. Night after night the police drone on that "... no motive has been established for the killing(s)". The circumstances of the Braeton killings are fated to remain a mystery like that of the 27 deaths in West Kingston, despite police enquiries. And there's now a backlog of over 112 murder cases in the courts. In other words, when we do manage to apprehend somebody, there seems to be inordinate difficulty in getting the evidence to court.
As the year wears on we're going to wish even harder that we had an informal economy to support us. Having instituted a policy of draconian tariffs on a flood of second-hand motor car imports, Dr. Davies is surely bottom-feeding now to levy new fees and high penalties on taxis, which is what many owners had to make of their cars in order to continue to afford them. This new regime will yield little more than a programme of institutionalised harassment, unless the private sale of licences by some members of the security forces ends, along with their private ownership of taxi cabs and buses.
Bribes from road traffic are regarded as a kind of environmental support by the police force, not unlike the payments given to dons on large construction projects.
If the authorities were less corrupt, the country would prosper and the life of every individual far less arbitrary and burdensome, but is there any hope of this?
