The Ignoramocracy

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Our dear prime minister has appointed yet another of his task forces to tell him exactly how we got into this unholy mess over the Doomsday Highway and Portmore.

The task force consists of a most talented group - some of the very people who got us into the mess: The National Road Operating and Construction Company, the Bouygues Company of France and the company set up by the Government to own the highway.

They are superbly qualified to make sense of the debacle. The only missing factors are Mr Kingsley Thomas of the Jamaica Development Bank and Mr Hylton of the Port Authority. And, perhaps, the National Environment and Planning Agency, which, like the prime minister, specialises in being invisible.

Some of us warned the prime minister and all other concerned parties five or six years ago that they were going about the Millennium Project the wrong way.

Some of us, indeed, suggested that what we needed was not a road across Jamaica concreting an area the size of Hanover, but the upgrading of existing roads and a more appropriate project like the Norwegian millennium project which put the entire educational system on the Internet for free access.

But the panjandrums of Jamaican development were adamant. They wanted to alter the Jamaican geography - to leave a lasting monument to globalisation and the insanity of bureaucrats in Jamaica and at the World Bank.

A section of the causeway bridge linking Kingston and Portmore.
The original idea for the road - as I have reconstructed it - was simple. The misbegotten causeway across Kingston Harbour was sinking, because as the builders were told 40 years ago, you don't build bridges on peat, quicksand and unconsolidated detritus. And you don't build bridges or anything else on that sort of material in a zone which is more susceptible to an earthquake disaster than Japan, Alaska or California.

The problem was: having built houses for nearly half-a-million people in a deathtrap, how do you go about ensuring that even a sizeable minority of them would be able to escape in the event of an earthquake, a tsunami or a hurricane?

Obviously, a new Portmore road had to be built, at great expense, because the original job had been so botched. The Port Authority was brought in to requisition the sinking old causeway for its spanking new world-class port. Got the picture?

The other problem was, of course, how to justify the expense of the new Portmore road. Simple: make it part of an enormous new project in which the Portmore costs would subside and become invisible, eventually, like the causeway.

Add to the mix a new international airport to replace Norman Manley and a another new town, another instant slum like Portmore/Braeton, another dormitory for Kingston, this one near May Pen and built in an area which is one of the world's most precious treasure-houses of biodiversity - Harris Savannah.

Many of us, including Greenpeace founder David McTaggart, have wondered why the Government of Jamaica had not signed the protocol to the Cartagena Convention respecting Specially Protected Areas and Wildlife (SPAW). Well, my friend David is now dead, so I can't now tell him that the reason the Government didn't sign SPAW was to preserve its vandalistic options re Harris Savannah.

David McTaggart and I had got solemn undertakings from two successive ministers of environment that the Government would soon sign SPAW. That was about four or five years ago. After all, this country was the official repository and registry for the SPAW treaty, yet, whenever there is a SPAW meeting, the registrar country, Jamaica, is an observer - not a member. It was and is a stinking disgrace.

Mr Patterson and Fidel Castro are the only two world leaders still around who in 1992 signed Agenda 21 in Rio de Janeiro. The Treaty of Rio pledged all of us to eradicate poverty by environmentally sound, sustainable development. Cuba is now a model for sustainable development. Jamaica is the bad example which teachers use to terrify their students. All this despite the PNP's election promises in 1997:
"Protecting and conserving our island's resources is an imperative, if we are to preserve its natural features and beauty.

"Man is dependent on the integrity of the environment and there is a sacred obligation to protect God's earth and to preserve the quality of life for future generations. "We have therefore pursued a collaborative national effort with the private sector and individual communities, to rescue areas of the environment that are under siege."

I could not have said it better myself. Unfortunately, all of the Jamaican environment is under siege today, mainly from our own Government.
In his New Year's speech 1999/2000, the prime minister spoke of the Government's Millennium Projects. "The centre-piece is Highway 2000. That will involve the construction of a 230-kilometre multi-lane tolled expressway, which will link Kingston to Montego Bay and Kingston to Ocho Rios.

"This project will be implemented on a Build-Own-Operate-Transfer, known as BOOT, model with the private sector taking the lead in arranging the financing. That will involve putting up their own money as equity in the venture. The company will operate and maintain the highway under a concession agreement.

"Most importantly," the PM promised, the Highway will spawn a range of developmental opportunities . to create significant employment and putting Jamaica on the path of sustained economic growth.
At least four well-laid out, 'user friendly' (sic) industrial parks would accompany the highway, with new technology sprouting everywhere, to produce "approximately 50,000 new direct job opportunities".

Despite the fact that the Government, according to their own publicity, began planning the Doomsday Highway in 1994, one year after they resurrected the Natural Resources Conservation Authority, they have paid nothing but lip service to the ideas embraced by Mr Patterson at Rio in 1992 and endorsed by the PNP in 1997.

Remember the attempted rape of Hope Gardens (1999), the continuing rape of Long Mountain - the spoliation of its unique biodiversity and the desecration of its Taino (Arawak) archaeological sites and the destruction of northcoast landscape by the new highway there?

In the brave new world of sustainable development, the NRCA, later renamed the NEPA, was supposed to guard our biological treasures, defend our landscape and generally work for the serenity and happiness of all of us.

Central to this idea was public participation in decision making through public examination and debate of Environmental Impact Assessments. The Government alleged that it had carried out this process, producing thousands of pages, impenetrable to any but the most dedicated statistical economist cum environmental expert. I think I am the only person who has ever attempted to read all of it.

As I said two years ago, "20th century triumphalism and arrogance knew no bounds, and since we are Jamaican and just a wee bit behind the times, we acknowledge none, except perhaps, those limits set by the IMF and World Bank. Certainly we don't need to consult or inform the hundreds of thousands of wage-earners whose pension funds are being sunk without a trace into the Doomsday Highway".
Mr Patterson sold us the highway with the idea that the foreign investors would be putting up the money for it. No such thing; most of the investment is Jamaican, from our pension funds and our National Housing Trust. The French company will be putting up some, but it is they who will reap the profits, not the Jamaicans who put up most of the
money. And of course, neither the Jamaican investors nor the inhabitants of those places to be affected have ever been consulted about what is being done "for their own good".
In the 1997 manifesto the PNP boldly declared that they would:

• Undertake a comprehensive programme to clean up the physical environment and to protect our beaches, watersheds, reefs and other sensitive ecosystems;
• revitalise our national parks and gardens and establish additional national and marine parks."

Say what?

The Port Authority, always in stealth mode, is stirring up the terminally polluted waters of Kingston Harbour, letting loose God knows what poisons and plagues. As I remarked three years ago in this column, the so-called EIA presented by the Port Authority was very scant on specific details:

"the Port Authority, knowing that the mud they are redistributing is toxic, do not know where it will eventually end up. They are going to spread their toxic waste in Hunts Bay, not sure whether it will stay there or spread across the harbour.

"At a public meeting the PAJ called to discuss the EIA two years ago [ie 2000], I asked the consultants whether it was not true that the material was classifiable as toxic waste according to international standards. The consultants said 'yes'.

"I then pointed out that to dispose of it outside the harbour [as was intended] would breach several international conventions. When it was suggested that it would perhaps be better to dump the stuff inside the harbour, I pointed out that the deposition of noxious material was prohibited under Jamaican laws going back to the 19th century." ('Do people really Matter' - Common Sense Feb 20, 2002).

Since that time, I have asked the Port Authority to explain whether the exotic toxins it has been and is now liberating in Kingston Harbour are a threat to the health of the people of Portmore and areas farther afield. They have refused to answer. I reminded them about Minimata in Japan, where, as in Kingston Harbour, there had been dredging of toxic material. What is much more serious is that the Port Authority knows, or should know, that their dredging and dumping can cause serious disease and death to unwary innocents.

"At Minimata in Japan, beginning about 50 years ago, people began to fall ill with strange and horrible symptoms. Adults and children lost their teeth and their hair, children were born brain-damaged, mothers miscarried and the abortions were frequently,monstrous."

The Port Authority carried on regardless. It is still doing its toxic excavation. No doubt, within a decade or so, when children in Portmore begin to be born with defective brains and genitals, misshapen bodies and degenerative diseases, which will kill them after years of horrible suffering and expense, we will know the answer to these questions.

Meanwhile, we can be comforted by Mr Patterson and his task forces. After all, wasn't he the party leader who promised: "Protecting and conserving our island's resources is an imperative. Man is dependent on the integrity of the environment and there is a sacred obligation to protect God's Earth and to preserve the quality of life for future generations."