UP until last week I had a dilemma — how do I vote in the upcoming election? Do I vote as I have been for the last three elections? Do I vote for the other party? In good conscience I can’t vote for either. Nor can I throw my vote away, for a no vote is a vote for what obtains.

Should I vote for Betty Ann Blaine’s new coalition? Is her party even in the running this year? Or are her candidates still chained to the clock in Half-Way-Tree? What about the tireless and ever-hopeful Ras Astor Black and his party?

So little time. So many choices and none of them feel right. And then it dawned on me — I’m no longer a citizen of this country, having been denied that sweet privilege in my last attempt to renew my passport. So the decision has been made for me. I am not a Jamaican citizen, therefore I cannot vote.

Between you and me, however, I think I may still have a vote. Chances are the two agencies — citizenship office and electoral office — don’t share information and my voter identification card is still valid. I hear even when you’re dead you can get a vote. So maybe I can even get an extra one or two and vote for all the parties running.

It’s of little comfort.

Margaret Cezair Thompson writes in her book, The True History of Paradise, about how people leave this island because they find the situations here unbearable, and how the rest of us stay because we no ha’ no passport or because our faith and hope that there is a brighter future know no bounds, or because we are distracted by the unbelievable beauty of the hills and the land.

“And now the sun rises above the hills, unsealing the horizon, spreading uncontainable brightness. Spears of sunlight… turning everything in the valley into a dance of lights, dazzling her.”

That dance of lights in the past few weeks has been blinding. We’re finding hundreds of missing chairs in churches and acres of missing carpet in government agency buildings. We’re selling off the nation’s assets without proper consultation. We’re building roundabouts and highways and bridges for hundreds of millions of dollars for the pleasure of a few.

We’re fixing some roads three and four times over within the space of months and leaving others unattended for years. We’re shooting blindly in the middle of traffic and then blaming the dead victim for the crime.

But Lord, look at those hills — they’re beautiful.

And were we to take our eyes off of them we would go mad.

I can’t help but think the former prime minister saw all of this coming, which is why he decided to skip town. Not a day goes by where we’re not amazed by the antics of those in charge. And now while they, for the next nine days, try to justify the National Works Agency’s (NWA’s) penchant for out-of-control spending, we’ll look to the beautiful hills and let the scandal blow over.

Don’t know the gentleman, but I am sure Patrick Wong, CEO of the NWA, feels like the scapegoat in the revelation of Auditor General Pamela Monroe Ellis’s special report on the handling of the US$400-million road programme.

His boss, Transport and Works Minister Mike Henry, has said that had he known of the NWA’s plans, he would not have allowed the expenditure of more than $100 million of Jamaica Development Infrastructure Programme (JDIP) funds to refurbish its corporate offices.

In case you’re thinking the minister is taking the easy way out and hanging Patrick Wong out to dry, think again. I’m on Minister Henry’s side: it’s hard to get any word out of the NWA. I have had no response to letters or calls over the past year about a retention wall that is required in the Gordon Town area lest a lady living there finds her house sliding onto the road below. Apparently, Mr Wong is the one to provide the information on proposals that the JDIP programme might look at, but he’s not talking.

And clearly he doesn’t have to. If Wong can just bear up over the next nine days, some other scandal will take the place of the current one, and Wong can go back to doing his work at the NWA.

On another note: We like Mrs Holness’s First Lady project — that of attending to the plight of the street boys in her charity, the Save Our Boys Foundation, which will be launched next year. The foundation will target street boys who hang out at traffic lights or who are idle in their Kingston communities and will seek to provide resource centres that they can go to without forcing them off the streets.

I’ve watched little boys grow up on the street corners in my neighbourhood and I’ve watched some of them slip irretrievably into madness too. It’s an important project, and we hope that, even if her husband does not succeed in the next election, that she will still pursue this cause with a passion.

scowicomm@gmail.com