WE HOPE that Mr. Roger Clarke, the Minister of Agriculture, shows greater resolution in tackling the problem of squatting than has been the case with those of his colleagues previously given the assignment. Hopefully, too, the response of Mr. Horace Chang is not a prelude to the Opposition's intent of frustrating any potential solution of what is a real and serious problem with the aim of gaining populist favour.
For, indeed, this matter of squatting is a major problem in Jamaica. According to Mr. Clarke, there are at least 300 informal or illegal settlements across the island, which the Government now wants to regularise. We would be surprised if there are not substantially more. The anecdotal evidence suggests there are.
Many people in this country have developed a penchant for moving unto lands, occupying huge acreages and when the owners of the properties complain for us to claim that there is a fight against 'small man' and 'sufferer'. It is an attitude that betrays a disregard for property rights, once it is the other person's property and a certain ambivalence towards wealth. It's the philosophy of 'let off', that lingering remnant of encrusted socialism.
Often, these illegal occupations come at a high environmental, social and even developmental price tag. People, for instance, move into watershed areas with their unauthorised settlements, removing forest cover, causing soil erosion and land slippage, the consequences of which have become so noticeable during recent, and particularly active, hurricane seasons. Or, raw sewage courses down rivers causing high faecal count in the sea. And when they are not building on hillsides, sometimes, unfortunately with permission, they may be constructing homes in natural depressions, swamps and wetlands and temporarily dry riverbeds or in areas where the contamination of ground water sources is inevitable.
It is usually expensive to fix such problems, both in terms of the cleanup or putting in the social infrastructure, which has not been planned for. But the biggest price is usually the political one.
Our governments and political parties may no longer be socialists, but they remain firmly populist, a disposition that causes them to accommodate squatting and unauthorised settlements until they are absolutely forced to do otherwise - no matter the ramshackle.
So before Mr. Clarke and the new unit charged with cleaning up the problem, there have been the other announced initiatives, like after the late 1990s riot in St. Ann when the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) attempted to reclaim its lands or when Mr. Joe Witter tried to get back his property in Montego Bay.
Hopefully, Mr. Clarke will have the gumption to see the job through. We would expect too that Dr. Chang will not strive for a self-fulfilling prophecy that the new initiative is nothing more than 'hot air'.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
