TWO Fridays ago when I was privileged to be the guest host on Betty-Ann Blaine’s talk show, On the Agenda, a caller who I happened to know was a JLP sympathiser phoned in to congratulate the Government on its initiative in assisting Haiti after the catastrophic January 12 earthquake.

In comparison to the 5.4-magnitude earthquake (10 seconds) which Jamaica experienced in 1993 – people who were in New Kingston at the time of the event told me they could see the high-rise office buildings visibly swaying – the 7.0-magnitude quake (about 15 seconds) which devastated Port-au-Prince would have had about 60 times the ground motion of the 1993 earthquake.

But back to the caller. In my response I suggested that while the Government had some moral obligation to assist Haiti, the exercise of that obligation needed money and the country was flat broke. In the early aftermath of the utter devastation our sympathies for the Haitians would be overflowing, but at some stage it had to dawn on us that the cost of maintaining a contingent of JDF soldiers in Haiti and medical personnel would soon prove too much for us, unless the US was prepared to pick up the tab.

But the focus of the caller was in congratulating the Government in taking the stance, and announcing it, that it would not be turning back Haitians who landed on our shores. It was my view that that was an open invitation for the poor and displaced Haitians to attempt the trip to Jamaica on rafts and in canoes while poor Jamaicans were struggling to make ends meet.

Could Jamaica afford an inflow of 200-500 Haitians? Absolutely no way! The caller disagreed with me.

“Would you be prepared to take in your home a small Haitian family?” I asked him. “Yes, I would, if I had the space, but I don’t.”

“OK,” I said. “Would you be prepared to donate something every month to offset the Government’s cost to house these Haitians here?”

“Yes,” he answered.

“How much would you be prepared to donate? Would you donate $1000 per month for maybe the next two years?” I asked.

His response was, “Mr Wignall, I am a pensioner and at this time I cannot afford that sort of money.”

He never suggested how much he would give, but the point I am making is that we begin with an outpouring of sympathy and give full rein to our emotions, but when it comes to putting our money where our mouth is, we shift gears and in doing so make the subtle implication that it is the next guy’s business.

There are times when the best way to assist another man is to give him funds to meet his immediate need. By the sheer size of the devastation, the suffering and unrelenting hunger that the Haitians are going through, it would have been natural that our early responses would have been to sit in front of our television sets and shed tears. But there are times when we have to recognise that if a family is homeless and penniless and we cannot provide the head of the household with a job and immediate shelter and our own pockets are depleted, the only practical choice is to give them a bag of food and move on.

It takes cash to care, said Eddie Seaga years ago. The poor cannot help the poor, and in fact, the greatest visible enemy of the poor is the poor. In these tough times those with the ability to adequately feed themselves and their families are convinced more than ever that the poor will always be with us. So the tendency is to mentally commit them to their fate, convince ourselves that our assistance and donations will only be a drop in the bucket, then move on with our own lives.

Caricom countries must help Haiti

The fact that Jamaica is $40 million in the hole in its assistance to Haiti tells us something less about our good heart and more about our fiscal irresponsibility. We have been told that the $40 million was extracted from the budget of the security ministry. Are we serious?

Did we not recently have a brief meeting with one of our bosses, the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? One would have thought that with Jamaica declaring its penurious state to all by actively engaging in IMF negotiations and with our high rate of violent criminality, the last thing we would ever have considered is an attempt to deplete the national security budget.

What must be acknowledged is that Haiti needs Caricom personnel on the ground there to assist in all areas such as security, food distribution, medical support, temporary housing and sewage/sanitation. The developed countries such as the USA and France have never indicated that they see Haiti as anything but a despised, deplorably poor country more in need of tolerating than long-term assistance.

We in Caricom need to be there because we share similar historical experiences in our passage to the Caribbean.

One observer connected to the Ezili Danto network, a most prolific Internet publication on Haiti’s pro-democracy advocacy, recently wrote a piece which captures the scenes on the ground in Haiti. Her name is Flavia Cherry and the date of the piece is January 31.

“It is a disgrace for so much money to be circling around to all kinds of aid groups and every single day I see so many people hungry, desperate. This situation is simply not acceptable. There are women in camps who have not had anything to eat for days. There are many available Haitians who are willing to assist as volunteers to get the aid to those who need it, and Caricom was willing to send help, but something seems to be really wrong. Why are Caribbean governments not allowed to play a more pivotal role, especially as there are many Caricom citizens and regional security officers who speak Creole and would be able to communicate better with the people of Haiti?”

She then paints a picture of the typical occupier who has lost sight of the real needs of the people and their plight.

“What I see on the ground is lots of big fancy air-conditioned vehicles moving up and down with foreigners, creating more dust and pollution on the roads. Thousands of military officers everywhere, heavily armed like they are in some kind of battle zone.”

Weak Leadership of René Préval

A day or so after the catastrophe struck Haiti, CNN interviewed Haiti’s president, René Préval. At the very moment when he needed to have shown the sort of leadership befitting the post of president, he said, “I don’t have anywhere to live. I don’t know where I am going to stay tonight.”

It could have been that he was seriously devastated by the catastrophe and words were failing him, but leadership must be made of sterner stuff.

Flavia Cherry wrote: “I was taking pictures, when suddenly everyone started to run towards the Palace gates. I stood on top of a vehicle and realised that it was President Préval who had ventured onto the lawn, and people started shouting out to him, saying that they were hungry. President Préval came to the fence and hundreds of people kept running towards the fence. Many of them were shouting ‘Lavalas, Aristide, Lavalas, Aristide!’

“Several others were asking President Préval why he had not addressed his people and told them what was happening. One woman put it this way, ‘I have not had anything to eat for four days and no one is hearing anything from the president; we have no idea what our Government is doing.'”

With the best will in the world Caricom will not be able to foot the bill for the work that it needs to do in Haiti. Instead of America’s hegemonic presence there, what it needs to do is formulate a structured programme with Caricom governments to assist it with funding and lessen the heavy boots and gas guzzlers on the ground in Haiti.

Powerful countries like America tend to manage countries like Haiti much better at the macro than micro level. In addition, they have no real connection so they feel little outside of the immediate expressions of sympathy. Flavia Cherry relates an incident which magnifies the need for Caricom nationals in Haiti.

“A young lady who had both legs amputated delivered a healthy baby on the ground, under a bed sheet. Not only were both legs amputated, but she had bandages all over her hips. Because of her condition, this expectant mother should never have been left out there on the streets at that advanced stage of her pregnancy because the chances of having a normal delivery in her physical condition were very slim.

“At the time of the delivery, people were everywhere, men, women, children, all huddled together under those sheets, for shelter from the sun. If there were complications, both mother and baby could very easily have passed, as no one in the camp had any transport or means of getting the mother to a medical facility. Other mothers were there with their newborns. This poor mother had nothing, no milk, no clothing for the baby, nothing! A doctor eventually came, but the mother was left there, with her baby, so we brought milk and supplies, including a sleeping bag. I know these are not normal times, but it is exactly for this reason, international aid agencies should be more inclusive and engage all those who are willing and capable of providing support.”

Shame and scandal in the police force

Let me first of all say that I do not buy the story that it was simply by way of a routine patrol that the police happened upon a cache of 18 guns (M-16s, Uzis, shotguns, pistols and revolvers) and thousands of rounds of ammunition and police ballistic vests at a house in the Mountain View area.

Arrests have been made and it includes at least one police sergeant.

But, of course, I can well appreciate that the police high command will have a need to protect those who supplied it with the information.

That the guns and ammunition were traced to the Police Armoury only confirms what many Jamaicans have known for years. Renegade cops are in the business of selling out the JCF to organised crime bosses. A few questions come up.

Were these cops already criminal-minded when they joined the JCF, or was it through circumstance or the social slide in the society that they became criminals?

Dysfunctional behaviour is fast becoming a part of Jamaica’s mainstream culture and our children are getting sucked into it daily. A few years ago I got certain information which led me to an all-age school in the Corporate Area.

The headmaster who begged me not to divulge the name of the school (I had no intention of doing so in the first place) confirmed that a nine-year-old boy was acting as pimp for some eight- and nine-year-old girls.

The boy’s mother was a weekend prostitute (in Negril, MoBay) and he was simply taking cues from her. His clients included other school boys his age and the fee structure was $50 to touch and $100 for more than touching.

Now that it has been firmly established that the police armoury is being depleted by renegade cops, the other question is, when was the last inventory done on the armoury? Many of us have known that certain policemen have been in the business of renting their guns to criminals, but selling them is quite another matter.

The other question is, how do we know that the cache of guns was not just another loan and that the guns would have been returned in, say, another month? And if that is so, for how long has this practice obtained and how many lives has it cost?

I expect that by the time this article is read on Sunday a number of police personnel will have taken flight.

I will hold the congratulations until I get the full story. Something just doesn’t add up.

IMF agreement will be no cakewalk

For those who believe that the IMF agreement recently signed for US$1.27 billion will mean that happy days are here again, I have news for them. This country will be subjected to a level of scrutiny never before seen as our new masters from the IMF set out to ensure that the agreement remains bankable throughout its existence.

The period leading up to the negotiations and especially the preconditions to the agreement ought to tell us that. Trevor Campbell, head of the Caribbean Online Forum, captures the mood as we head to the altar to meet our unsmiling, no-nonsense bride, dressed in battle gear.

Writing last Thursday, he said, “The Jamaican political managers and their technocratic advisors are about to be subjected to a level of political and economic scrutiny that they have never experienced before. The managers at the IMF are going to be holding their collective feet to the fire. They are going to be kept in a permanent state of anxiety and nervousness, as the IMF managers insist that the loans be used on projects that are directly or indirectly tied to the production of surplus value. Fasten your seat belts, folks, Jamaica is about to enter an intense period of economic turbulence and class struggle as the necessary restructuring of social relations gets underway.”

Enough said!

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