Mark Wignall

A termite by any other name - "chi chi", "duck ants", is still a termite. To the untrained eye it is ugly, but to all it is a curse and a destructive pest of the worst kind. Termites consume wood, but readers will be amazed to know that termites cannot digest the cellulose found in wood.

In the stomach of a termite is a unicellular organism which lodges itself there and creates one of the great wonders of symbiosis. Once the termite swallows the chewed up wood, the microscopic organism consumes it, breaks it down and passes out a form of food which the termite eventually digests and lives on. Nature in action.

The economics of modern-day Spanish Town is all about petty trading (vending) and shop- keeping (haberdashery, bars) and small service-oriented businesses (barbershops, beauty salons) with a few large plazas placed there to mop up the few dollars earned by the poor.

Spanish Town is dense and cramped, and rather than having one or any order, it is a picture of chaos, abandonment by successive governments and total madness in urban planning. When the modern sociology and the post-independence politics of the town which was once the great capital are examined, it is then that one starts to see the reality of the termite and its destructive nature in Spanish Town.

By both omission and commission, successive politicians (termites) have consumed the heart, the life and the spirit of the poor voting population of Spanish Town and environs while they have been sustained by goon behaviour and gunmanship (the microscopic organism). The termites have now distanced themselves and, by some quirk of nature, the organisms have spilled over into the streets and are now consuming each other.

My first introduction to life in Spanish Town was in 1989 when a policeman assaulted and wounded me when I attempted to rescue a girl I am certain he was detaining and assualting because she was "too lovely to behold". But prior to that, in the months leading up to the October election of 1980, it was Spanish Town, Olympic Gardens, the city's west end and Wareika/Mountain View which led off this country in its wild and mad attempt to self-destruct.

In 1995 when JLP MP for Central St Catherine, Bruce Golding, walked away from the "dutty" politics of gunmanship, donmanship and garrison control, and opted for a new order and beginning, it was an admission by Golding that he was one of the engineers building the duck ants nest. It was also the hour of his remorse, penitence and a plea to the nation to forgive him.

With the birth of the NDM in 1995, Central St Catherine, with Spanish Town as the headquarters, was already a fully-grown adult reprobate feeding on itself and suffering all the fallout resulting from a man strong on hunger and anger and starved of affection in his formative years. In the pages of this newspaper, I congratulated Golding for walking away from the nastiness of gun politics in the lead-up to his contesting the seat in 1997 on the NDM ticket. Had he resorted to the convenient omissions of the old JLP order by turning a blind eye to goons and guns, it is my belief that, with his level of organisation in place, he could have won one seat for the NDM, with much blood, of course, on his hands.

Once Golding made that move to a "new and different" politics, gunmen with fanatic loyalties to the JLP and their young mercenaries moved from Central Kingston and West Kingston to Tawes Pen, Homestead and surrounding areas, for the sole purpose of securing the seat for the JLP, just in case Golding turned out to be two-faced, that is, penitent to the media and ruthless to the street on election day.

When the JLP's Babsy Grange was placed as JLP caretaker for Central St Catherine, a message was sent to all and sundry that the JLP would not be making any adjustments to the politics it had been nurtured on all the years before.
Destroy, divide and rule because in politics, there is no silver medal.

While Golding was MP for Central St Catherine, he suffered from the same problems now besetting Portia Simpson Miller in attempting to bring economic change and social uplift to the poor constituents in their respective areas. Both had to be fighting an impossible battle to get central government to pump well-needed funds into their constituencies for developmental purposes.

The present caretaker for Central St Catherine, Babsy Grange, is weak and short on organisation and ideas for development. If she has a strength, it is in her fanatic loyalty to a lost and embarrassing cause, and her attachment to a politics of the past because her mind is firmly rooted there. She is not respected in her constituency and many residents whom I spoke with in the last week would like her to step aside.

The birth of the "One Order" gang is an embarrassment to the JLP, not just because it was an attempt to merge all JLP gangs outside of the pre-eminent one (it featured in St James in recent times) but mainly because the pre-eminent one was downsizing and becoming more high-tech.

Jamaica is a main trans-shipment point for cocaine running between South America and USA. It is also a favoured destination for illicit financial transactions, that is, money laundering. A lot of what sustains the rough inner-city areas in Jamaica's urban settings is the mix of this illegality. Only the well-organised, tried and tested gangs are involved in these illicit activities. Outside of this, the others have no other alternative but to feed on their own communities. With nothing in the national economy for them, too many guns and too much hunger are now chasing after benefits which have grown fewer. The result is chaos and Spanish Town.

Rev Herro Blair is only the latest needle and thread and plaster to come along. The politics needs purging because those in whom we invested the will to make the change are still mired in the destructive politics of the past.
My heart bleeds for Spanish Town

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