Dawn Ritch, Contributor
THE OPERATIONS of our Government are seriously at odds with the financial reality of our circumstances.
So sure were they of billions of dollars promised by the Jamaican private sector for Hurricane Ivan relief that they set up a new government institution specifically to administer the money and appointed Price Waterhouse its auditors. Nothing near that has come in of course.
The Most Honourable has publicly reminded them of their pledges, but a shifty-eyed Finance Minister said on TV he had not believed the private sector and, from past experience, only believes the colour of money.
The financial institutions which offered special low-interest hurricane loans to homeowners who sustained damage report that there has been little interest in the offer. People appear to be using their savings instead. Certainly, they don't appear as individuals to be in any hurry to incur new debts no matter how attractive the rate of interest, and not even on their place of residence.
Visiting the scene of yet another fire among the shacks of his poor constituents, the minster of security grandly announces to accompanying television cameras "Dis board house ting cyan work. It 'ave to concrete."
Either the members of the Government of the day are lunatics or they are determined to continue to mislead, misguide and misgovern the country. They never seem to tire of making promises they know cannot be fulfilled, nor of pretending that the financial resources exist to turn pumpkins into horse-drawn carriages.
The private sector doesn't have a billion dollars to plunk down on the table to meet hurricane or any other emergency relief. This is Jamaica, not New York City.
In promising to do otherwise the companies were just as overcome as the Most Honourable who instituted an illegal public emergency in a state of blind panic. They haven't come forward with the cash, and he can take his mind off it.
RUBBISH ON THE STREETS
In the meantime, Hurricane Ivan still lives on the streets all over the island. On Elgin Road in Kingston, vines have begun to grow over the rubbish left in the street. Tree limbs lie where they were sawn. The neat stacks of household rubbish on the sidewalks of inner-city communities have now become a form of degraded street art. And that's 50 days since the hurricane swept by.
Where is Alston Stewart, the voluble head of the island's solid waste management company? He can't prevent the co-ops he hired from setting fire to the island's main municipal dump, and seven weeks later he still can't complete the hurricane garbage clean-up either. Then why is he there?
This shouldn't require an Office of National Reconstruction or Danville Walker to ensure transparency. There can be no excuse whatsoever for failure to perform this most elementary of municipal duties, the collection of garbage.
Within days of the Hurricane, Mr. Stewart announced that he had already spent $22 million on the recovery effort. Yet to me it looks as though the sidemen and the contractors are refusing to work, and the garbage trucks are out of gas.
This continued and appalling neglect of the clean-up of cities and towns throughout Jamaica calls for an immediate and rigorous audit into the accounts both pre-Ivan and post-Ivan of the entity responsible. The nation must know what the budget is and how it is being spent.
I have noticed three front-end loaders at a time uptown doing nothing, while downtown the garbage continues to pile up in the inner cities. The question must be asked, therefore, who has the contracts for the different areas of the city, and how these contracts were awarded.
We must also know who has the contract for the operations of the dump, and the equipment used out there. Was there a hefty U.S. dollar loan to turn it into a landfill, how was that contract awarded and has it been satisfactorily performed? It's things like these that earn Jamaica a reputation for muddle and a lack of transparency.
LUDICROUS REQUEST
And so it has become even with the Electoral Advisory Commission. They have just announced that they want another $490 million to do house-to-house registration, and before the 10 years when they said we would need another one.
Jamaica paid a fabulous sum of money not long ago for a new electoral system, the point of which was continuous registration. It is simple.
If you move your residence, you go to the Electoral Office, report that you've moved and the Returning Officer is supposed to verify your new address physically. If you move your residence less than three months before an election, you vote at the polling station for your old address. In this way, the list is updated on an on-going basis.
The request now from the EAC for half billion dollars for new house-to-house registration is the most ludicrous thing I've heard in a long time, and totally unnecessary.
It is exceeded only by Minister of Security Dr. Peter Phillip's plan, as part of Operation Kingfish, to buy a $200 million automated fingerprint identification system.
The EAC already has highly expensive fingerprint system for the electorate that ought to be of some help to him. Surely his system need not cost so much. Moreover it will probably work to as little effect as the EAC's operations in conserving the nation's scant resources.
There is no point in borrowing nearly a billion dollars more to do what they're only going to try to subvert anyway, while the poor are left to rot in the filth of uncollected garbage.
There ought to be organisational cooperation between the various branches of Government, together with an obligation to account to taxpayers for the on-going monumental waste of borrowed financial resources.
That there is no such inclination demonstrates that the Patterson regime is nothing more than a loose cannon.
