John Maxwell
In 1973, nearly forty years ago,I was one of the journalists on the new JBCTV public affairs programme, Press Conference – later renamed Firing Line. One of the first guests on the programme was Moses Matalon, the first chairman of the UDC – the Urban Development Corporation.
Mr Matalon was then – as we say in Jamaica ‘in him ackee’. He had been installed in 1968 by the JLP Finance and Development Minister Edward Seaga and confirmed by the new, PNP Prime Minister, Michael Manley when he took office in 1972.
Someone of course had to invent the aphorism: ‘JLP or PNP in office, no matter, Matalon in power!’
The UDC was then at the height of its public relations prowess, spinning out brochure after brochure detailing how the corporation was going to give Jamaica an extreme makeover and convert it into the Miami of the Caribbean.
At that time, Hellshire had only recently been rediscovered. The rugged geology conspired with the harsh climate to keep Hellshire out of sight to all but a few Jamaicans, mainly bird-shooters and crocodile hunters like James Gore, father and son, hog hunters and fishermen. The UDC decided to change all that. It was going to build another Kingston across the water – eclipsing Portmore whose prospects were pretty dim at that time.
Some of us who knew something about Hellshire would drive out on the new UDC road to swim and eat some fish with the fishermen. It was even possible to skinny dip on the deserted white sand beach with 20-ft dunes walling off parts of the beach from easy view.
It was paradise, whether you inhaled or imbibed or simply lay about in blissful, peaceful idleness.
About two or three weeks before Mr Matalon’s appearance on Press Conference a few of us found an enormous gully cut across the road to Hellshire – between Fort Clarence and Halfmoon Bay.
On Press Conference Mr Matalon expatiated on his plans to remodel Jamaica, always skirting delicately round Hellshire. In response to a direct question he admitted, yes, there was a plan to develop Hellshire as a tourist resort . I asked him whether he realised that Halfmoon Bay was the only good beach within reach of Kingston’s sweltering multitudes. He said there was Gunboat Beach. I said Gunboat was now too dirty for swimming and even with its neighbour, Buccaneer Beach there was not enough space for Kingston’s people.
Since he didn’t reply to that I asked him why had the UDC cut the road to Hellshire preventing people going to the beach?
Matalon said he didn’t know the road had been cut. I told him it had been done, when and by whom. Would he make inquiries and ensure that the road was back in operation say, by the weekend?
Somewhat sheepishly, he agreed.
Matalon regarded me, as a journalist, as a damned nuisance. In 1977, when I became Chairman of the Natural Resources Conservation Authority, he became really upset with me.
Obnoxious Obstructionist
Matalon was what they call ‘multi-faceted’: He was not only chairman of the public sector UDC Group, he was also Chairman of the Portmore Land Development Company the developers and West Indies Home Contractors, the builders of Portmore, and a director of the Adventure Inn/Forum group, etc., etc., ad nauseam.
We clashed over Portmore, further development of which we stopped, until the developers agreed to reserve land for parks, schools, public buildings including an advanced health clinic, a fire brigade station and several police stations. We also insisted on serious strengthening of the foundations of the houses, since Portmore was underlain by irregular lenses of peat, sand, quicksand, unconsolidated clay and gravels and other debris deposited by the Rio Cobre, the Sandy Gully and other streams which had formed the estuary on which Portmore was being built. The whole area was subject to liquefaction in a sufficiently violent earthquake.
We also insisted on a complete modern sewage treatment plant plus measures to mitigate hurricane storm surge and flooding from the rivers.
The upshot was that Michael Manley summoned me to Jamaica House to inform me that the houses at Waterford, originally to be sold for $7,000 would now cost $11,000.
In one particular exchange Mr Matalon was upset by some figures I had quoted on earthquake risk at Portmore. He then said: “But Mr Maxwell, you are not an engineer!”
To which I replied: “But neither are you, Mr Matalon!”.
As far as he was concerned, and as he told Vin Lawrence a few minutes later, Maxwell was simply “an obnoxious, overeducated Rasta!” In addition to which, I seemed far too fond of mangroves and mosquito-breeding swamps.
Relocating the Fishermen
I got along well with the Rasta fishermen of Hellshire. They had heard that they were to be ‘relocated’ and asked me to help them. Their beach was to be converted into an exclusive Beach Club and they would have to find some other place to scratch a living
Some of these men had been on Halfmoon Bay for more than thirty years, and there seem to have been fishermen on that beach since the Tainos. The UDC had come in, knocked down Fort Johnstone and other ruins or allowed freebooters to sack them for the stones. A pair of contractors told me that they had been paid to remove the dunes and transport the sand to the nascent Adventure Inn/Forum in Port Henderson.
The UDC had revised its plan for Hellshire. In that limestone desert they were going to build a collection of suburban developments but still backed by the beach club.
I argued with the UDC, wanting them to reserve wilderness and scientific reserves. I argued the despite what they thought, the hog-hunters knew that iguanas and coneys were not extinct but still lived in Hellshire.
I begged them for 32 acres of land at Halfmoon Bay for the fishermen. We wanted space for a fishing village, a secure area for boats and gear and an area behind the beach where the fishermen and the families could sell the cooked result of their labours.
I got nowhere until I went to talk to Michael Manley He deputed Hugh Small and D.K.Duncan to try to solve the problem. We were valiantly backed up by Beverley Manley.
It was agreed – in 1979 – that the UDC would turn over ten acres of land to the Fishermen’s Cooperative
Slippery customer
The UDC is by far the slipperiest customer with whom I have ever had to deal.
•A few years ago, fully aware that their legal department had already signed off on the transfer of Title to the fishermen – although the fishermen had not been informed – the UDC proceed under cover of darkness to criminally trespass on the houses of the fishermen, bulldozing them, while publicly and libellously claiming that the people were squatters.
•In or about 1980, the UDC, having been informed that what they proposed was illegal, proceeded to construct a groyne at the outlet to Jackass Water Hole, starving the fisherman’s beach of sand. now, a quarter of a century later, because the Jackass Water hole groyne has colleted enough sand on its southeastern side to make a new, small beach, additional sand is once again flowing to Haalfmoon Beach. The dunes are back and new middleclass squatters have built substantial buildings on them, contrary to law and common sense and against the interest of the original stakeholders and the public interest.
•According to the campaign now being waged in the Gleaner, the fishermen are merely leaseholders and any minute now I expect the UDC to claim that these are 24-hour leases, or some such lunacy.
The propaganda is that the beach is a hotbed of gun and drug smugglers though how these activities would go unnoticed in this community mystifies me. Perhaps the beach will be seized as the product of contraband activity and sold, perhaps to the Spaniards. I wonder who will get the finder’s fee?
It is simply the latest in a series of campaigns to demoralise the fishermen, subvert their leadership, undermine their will and spirit and drive them off the beach.
Now that the white sand is back, the beach has become ‘marketable’– the sand is valued by the ounce, and the poor fishermen and their families are about to be defrauded of their legitimate interest. The public is about to have another beach stolen, despite the existence of prescriptive rights inherent in the fishermen and in their clients such as you and me.
The state, as the Public Trustee, will betray its trust, as usual
Incredible stories have surfaced, all to suggest that poor people’s rights are not worth respecting. And all those who, over the years, refused to help defend the fishermen and to build a really attractive folk industry centre will no doubt be happy when steel gates go up across the beach and you are offered croissants instead of festival with your Dover sole a la bonne femme.
The Brutification of Falmouth.
I haven’t seen it myself, but I do not doubt the stories I’ve been told of the savage attack now in progress on the history and archaeology of Falmouth. I know, as a boy and much more recently, that in the Falmouth nearshore it was possible to pick up 300 year old bottles and other relics of the past.
Now, people watching the dredging say they have seen historic artefacts in the material being dredged for the establishment of the proposed cruise shipping pier. These artefacts are unceremoniously dumped in the offshore deeps.
If this is true I believe the coroner for the area should be informed and that he should take immediate action to end this depraved assault on our history and our culture. Is there no one in Falmouth, or Trelawny or in Jamaica, public-spirited enough to pledge some money to fight these barbarians in court?
Copyright ©2009 John Maxwell jankunnu@gmail.com
Why We Fail
John Maxwell
Once upon a time, it seemed, we could do no wrong. These days, it seems we can do nothing right.
Apart from the brilliant natural talent of our young men and women, everything we touch turns to lead.
But wait!
If our young people can do so well at athletic sports, at university and in competition with spellers ad chess players from all over, how come we’re not doing much better, overall? Why are so many of our kids killing themselves or being killed by other kids or getting into all kinds of bizarre trouble?
Perhaps we should ask Mr Latibeaudiere, lately governor of the bank of Jamaica, who earns in a year more than most of us would earn in several lifetimes. Anyone paid as much as he must be very, very wise indeed. Or perhaps we should ask Mr Tony Hylton, head of the Port Authority, whose weight is enough to anchor US$200+ millions in debt – no questions asked about how we will pay back this money.
On one side of our society are thousands of children who, given encouragement and the right leadership, will work like slaves to excel and do well for their country. On the other side are ladies and gentlemen of exalted degree whose mantra is development and who persistently ask a question so simple that it should be duck soup to answer: why can’t the police reduce the crime rate?
Such a simple question.
Really?
One of the good things about writing for the press is the feedback. You get it in the shops, in the newspaper columns and courtesy of some of the so-called talk-shows. I’ve got it from fishermen in Discovery Bay and Treasure Beach, from a ‘limousine’ driver in Ridgefield, Connecticut and from Rastas everywhere.
In response to my column last week there were several of the standard responses, suggesting that I am simply wrongheaded and wondering why I didn’t join the respectable classes.
They didn’t quite put it that way. A few weeks ago an item in the Gleaner’s historical highlights reminded me of a time when I provoked even more anger. The was an item about the introduction of the National Minimum Wage, (October 22, 1975) a fight begun and carried on Public Eye until it was eventually successful. But not before one stush chatelaine in her stush Benz took deliberate aim and spat at me as I walked on South Odeon Avenue.
October was a busy month for me in the Gleaner’s highlights, recounting my close encounter years earlier (October 23, 1960) with the statue of Lewis Quier Bowerbank, one of George William Gordon’s murderers. At about midnight on that October night 49 years ago, I unleashed my sledgehammer in protest against Bowerbank and the fact that Gordon was still considered a criminal. People noticed, although only a few knew who the midnight ‘vandal’ was.
Memories like these amuse me when I read something like this
“Yawn!!
Maxwell, sometimes I think you encourage slackness too much. Squatters and other so-called underprivileged are responsible for the uglification of Jamaica.
What is it that you have against progress? Do you want Jamaica to continue in poverty and ugliness because people have to “scratch out a living”? “
There exists a whole phalanx of critics who have swallowed gallons of the Globalisation Kool-Aid and who believe that Jamaica would be well on the way to “Take-Off” if only we were more “competitive”
These characters don’t realise that we are competitive where it counts: Our interest rates are among the highest in the world, to try to persuade people to rinse their money here rather than in Cayman; We have more underemployed able-bodied skilled and unskilled. people than anywhere else. Our country, instead of being able to be in any way self-reliant,has forgotten how to cook and instead depends on junk-food and imported sugar water for sustenance.
And then they wonder why people are so violent.
Is there anyone in Jamaica who makes his/her own butter? I did at my Uncle Hugh Cork’s small farm, first in Tollgate and then in Juno Gully, May Pen. I learned to manage honeybees, goats, cows, chickens, turkeys and rabbits. Our people having been driven off the land can’t tell the difference between coco and dasheen or know what you mean when you speak of renta, St Vincent, Lucea or himba. The development of bauxite has obliterated enormous areas of Jamaican culture, devastating farmland, driving fathers abroad and mothers and their children to kraals in inhospitable cities.
The sense of community is destroyed. The artisan skills of the elders is replaced by cheap shoes, cheap clothes, cheap furniture and cheap ‘food’ from abroad. Our people are adrift in the most extreme shopkeeper culture in the world, ignorant and incompetent to help themselves.
Many of the apparently Jamaican products now merchandised here are imported. No Jamaican farmers are involved. Even some coconut water is imported from southeast Asia. The merchants see no need to foster Jamaican agriculture. After all, they are helping famers, in Thailand, Brazil and California. That’s Development!
“Come on, let development proceed and we will have more people getting employment.
I don’t know about you but I don’t want to live in a country where we have all these underdeveloped establishments”
The ‘underdeveloped establishment’ would be a community owned beach, run by the community with minimal assistance, perhaps, from state agencies. That was the aim. But there were and are forces in this country determined that poor people should have no autonomy and for nearly forty years they have sabotaged, corrupted and tried to destroy that dream of Hellshire and a productive, autonomous community.
The causes of Squatting
One in every three people in Jamaica is a squatter, driven off the land by bauxite or some other ‘development’. We can’t afford to find safe housing land because, when the Constitution was being written in 1962 the rich decided that the government effectively must pay cash for any property it wanted. So housing is built on marginal farmland which has defaulted into the hands of government. We lose land for food and endanger the lives of those who live on these lands. We can’t plan to develop places like May Pen or Santa Cruz because the speculative vultures have cornered the land markets. Instead we build dormitory disasters on land subject to flooding or landslides.
In beautiful and historic Falmouth, we are busy making a billion dollar cosy corner for the Royal Caribbean Line on the alleged promise that they will be bringing 6,000 visitors a week to Falmouth What we don’t know is that we have probably been conned…
Mr Arthur Frommer is probably the foremost travel writer/publisher in the world. He has been investigating the fabled Oasis of the Seas . Here Is Mr Frommer:
“Starting in May of 2010, Half of the Itineraries of ‘Oasis of the Seas’ Become Cruises to Nowhere
“You have only to read the actual schedules of the new, 220,000-ton, 6,000-passenger Oasis of the Seas to understand the revolutionary nature of the changes it will bring about. .…
On weekly, seven-night sailings, the mammoth ship leaves each Saturday afternoon from Ft. Lauderdale, … then sailing for six more days and nights. Every week, on all itineraries, it spends three of those six days simply at sea, stopping nowhere. And then, on an itinerary it follows every other week starting in May, it devotes the fourth of those six days to a stop at the “private island” (actually a “private beach”) of Labadee on the coast of Haiti. Labadee, as you may have experienced on one of your own cruises, is a totally isolated stretch of sand fenced in by barbed wire and guards from Haiti and Haitians. “
There’s more, much more here:http://www.frommers.com/blog/
As I reported nearly a year ago, the new megaships are no longer means of transportation; they are full-fledged resorts in their own right, offering dozens of restaurants, casinos, shops, auctions and other consumerist attractions too grandiose to mention.
The Oasis of the Seas will make land-based hotels irrelevant. Instead of bringing visitors to Jamaica the new ships will bring an ersatz Jamaica to the visitors. Each of these ships will be human zoos specially designed to bemuse their clientele…
‘Crapital’ (sic) of the world
According to the literature each ship’s ‘central park’ will be basically a mini ‘jungle’ themed to reflect an imaginary island, say Jamaica, no doubt with its quota of 5 iguanas, 3 crocodiles, 2 dozen parrots, a cage of humming birds and other ‘authentic’ simulacra of the ‘authentic’ island experience – about as much authentic ‘nature’ as a couch potato can stand– and making it unnecessary to actually visit the place.
One cannot help hoping that these benefactors of the sea will have the forethought to include appropriate accommodation in their casinos to display retired politicians and other ginnigogs in their natural habitat.
Given all this, the rationale for the Falmouth cruise shipping centre is simple: There’s got to be somewhere to dump the huge amounts of waste generated by such a monumentally environmentally unfriendly project. Falmouth’s destiny is to act as a relief point for the ship to be sanitised, resupplied with cheap Jamaican water and for the ship its passengers and crew to offload their excrement in what will become the cruise crapital (sic) of the world. And, thanks to the Port Authority, we get to pay for it – another taxpayer privilege like the Doomsday Highway.
You read it here first.
What is development?
The Kool Aid drinkers, waiting on Deliverance will wait in vain. They will soon discover that there is little difference between the likes of Bernard Madoff and Goldman Sachs apart from the fact that one has immeasurably more ‘backative’ than the other but they were in their own way, developers, making things happen, destroying pensions nest-eggs and lives.
We in Jamaica, particularly people like Derek Latibeaudiere, would understand this. It is a natural consequence of ‘development.’
In Germany there is a substantial number of people who feel differently. They were brought up in a society, like old time Jamaica, where people looked out for each other. This philosophy is even engrained in the law, which mandates what is called “co-determination” in which the workers have a statutory interest in their enterprise, in the goods or services they produce and in the management of their production. Workers sit on the boards of management, even of Krupp and Volksagen.
It was therefore no surprise to me to read two news items from Germany that may have startled some others but didn’t really shock me. Just as Goldman Sachs was announcing a bonus fund for its managers equivalent to the GDP of the Greater Antilles, the BMW company was announcing new bonus and pay policy.
Sustainable Culture
“BMW plans to tie executive bonuses to those of its blue-collar workers, in a bid to create a fairer and sustainable compensation environment within the company.
” Starting in 2010, the company will use a common formula to ascertain and award bonuses to its upper and lower level employees, based on the company’s performance as measured by profit, sales and other factors. That means that upper level management could potentially lose more money than their lower level counterparts for bad performance, BMW said.”
According to a spokesman BMW wanted not only to produce sustainable cars but a sustainable corporate culture.
Mr Golding should perhaps ask My Latibeaudiere to write him a short study on the possibilities of applying these principles in Jamaica
The other news item did startle a few of my friends. Some rich Germans have come together to petition their government to raise their taxes to help their country. For retired doctor Dieter Kelmkuhl, 66, it is time the wealthy came to the aid of their country.
Dr Kelmkuhl estimate that if the 2.2 million Germans who have personal fortunes of more than 500,000 euros (750,000 dollars) paid a tax of five percent this year and next, it would provide the state with 100 billion euros.
Perhaps Mr Golding could ask the Private Sector Organisation to come up with a comparable proposal. It is well known that Jamaican salaries at the top are competitive with the Developed world, and Jamaicans are famous for their generous and benevolent nature – as Lady Nugent and the Caymanians can testify.
We could easily raise the money to build our own cruise-ship. After all,seventy five years ago, the 27,000 small farmer members of the Jamaica Banana Association raised the money to build three ocean going “banana boats” – the Jamaica Producer, the Jamaica Pioneer and the Jamaica Planter, two of them sunk in wartime service.
What couldn’t we do if we could get the rich to invest in Jamaica?
If we started by putting money into education (meals, buildings, teachers, playing fields) we would certainly not find it necessary to change Commissioners of Police quite so often.
As the World Bank might say –”Trust us!”
Copyright©2009 John Maxwell – jankunnu@gmail.com
- commentary
on 8 November, 2009 at 7:48 am Comments (1)