Alarming reports from the Meteorological Office and the water authority last week indicate that that we are in for a long, hot season ahead.

The predictions are dire as we are not likely to see enough rain or replenishment to meet our normal needs up to the end of the year.

This is highly unusual. Such reports normally give us a time frame of perhaps two or three months at the most before we get the rains. Now we are being told that it’s not just the heavenly showers. Water sources, river heads, springs, and streams are literally disappearing.

I was driving on the River Road through the Bog Walk Gorge last week when the minister of water made his annual announcement about those miserable water restrictions. I looked down and saw that Old Man River beneath me was as flat and docile as Flat Bridge. It had a surly, copper-greenish colour and appeared lifeless in sections where it widens its course before reaching Dam Head outside of Angels.

Further up the road, approaching Kent Village, it narrows into a pitiful-looking stream with the rocks on the river bottom surfacing and exposing a river bed you could easily cross without having to worry about “a how me ago come over”.

Now this is an important river. Its survival is critical to the continued existence of communities large and small which depend on it for their subsistence. It is the major river in St Catherine and travels the entire parish from above Worthy Park to where it enters the Kingston Harbour at Hunt’s Bay. It nourishes valleys and provides irrigation on the plains. Just think of those major towns in the parish: Spanish Town, Linstead, and Bog Walk are built around the river and you will appreciate its value to life and industry.

It also has historical value. For example, at the turn of the 20th century it provided a hydro electric source for the Bog Walk Power Station which was served by an eight-foot-diameter pipe, 6,200 feet long, carrying water to the pump from the Rio Cobre. It was said to be the largest pipe in the world, weighing 1,742,844 lbs of solid steel, and held together by 259,102 rivets, providing a major visitor attraction.

The station provided power for the Kingston tram car system and the lines went all the way downhill to the power station’s Barry Street headquarters.

But one fateful morning on June 27, 1904, 61 men went into the pipe to clean silt and debris on their regular maintenance schedule. Within an hour, what started as a small getaway drip in the pipe swelled to alarming proportions. The water rose steadily and by 4:00 am there was panic as the men struggled to escape. Some were penned up in the narrow space, trampling each other in a mad stampede. Others threw their torches into the water causing complete darkness. Bodies writhed and wrestled with each other. It was a disaster of immense proportions. When the smoke cleared, 33 victims were found drowned, faces and bodies completely mutilated.

As the bodies were hauled up, the piercing shrieks of relatives reverberated among the rocks in one long, painful sound. At the coroner’s enquiry that followed, lawyer W Bagget Grey waxed eloquent as he appealed to the jury to find the supervisors guilty: “You are having a duty to perform to the inarticulate dead, the bereaved relatives, and to His Majesty, the King, who has been deprived of 33 of his loyal subjects.” The jury returned a verdict of death by misadventure.

The station was eventually closed over time and the ruins can be seen on the right just after leaving Kent Village heading towards Kingston. But people are still fearful of the spirits said to haunt the area searching for loved ones, and a foothold to get out of the pipe that trapped them in 1904.

But, not to worry. Rio Cobre or Copper River, as it was named by the Spaniards (hence the copper-looking colour observed last week), will stay its course. That’s not much comfort for the present moment, where thousands of us are not only feeling the heat, but facing critical water shortages whether we wash at the riverside or with a Whirlpool. The outlook is grim, with bans declared on watering gardens, filling pools, washing cars, roadways, pavements, and garages. We can live with that, but pity those who now have to cope with extended hours of water lock-offs, inconvenient bathing times, toilets unflushed. Not to speak of my St Elizabeth friends who depend totally on rainwater.

There were no smiles at the press conference to announce the restrictions. Everyone had on their El Nino face. For the Robert Pickersgill, Minister of Water et cetera, who dresses and looks the part of the climate change sector that he controls, there is a bleak future ahead for both water and politics.

Outside of the pallid excuse of local government reform as a reason for not calling the elections, you bet that no sensible government would have put their hat in the ring at this time. We are just going to have to paddle along with who and what we have at the helm for as long as is possible. Don’t look for any elections this year. The climate and Pickersgill are not prepared for this.

And speaking of politics, we understand that a certain party has been gearing up to use the construction of the Opposition Leader’s house as campaign fodder. Better forget it! For one thing, the house will have been built by the time the elections come around, and Andrew will be home. The consensus appears to be that he has a right to build his dream house, and out of his own pocket. Besides, the published photographs showed other houses in the neighbourhood as elaborate as the one being built. The only thing is that his judgement and timing is called into question; as with the way the water is running, this is going to be one real dry-weather house.

Never mind. Holness can take comfort in the stories of the political vibes that were thrown at Bustamante through verse and song as part of the election campaigns of earlier times. In one popular tune of the 1940s the people poked fun at Busta’s housing plans: “Busta promise us electric fan, but no house, no lan’ fi heng it pon.”

I admit I was looking forward to the election campaign, if only for the singing that accompanies party meetings. Jamaicans are well known for their sense of humour and ability to tease rivals. This characterised the songs of the political parties in the early days. For example, way back in 1951, following the devastation brought on by Hurricane Charley, Rose Leon, then a member of the Jamaica Labour Party, was successful in securing clothing for some hurricane victims.

But around the same time it was alleged that the JLP had said at a public meeting that salt fish is more important than education. ‘Who tell them to say that?’ The PNP went into ecstasy. At meeting after meeting the refrain rang out: “Old clothes govament, a weh me do yu? Sal’fish govament, a weh me do yu? Chaka chaka govament, a weh me do yu? Mi ask yu fi wok an’ yu gi’ me ole clothes.” Now you know why the JLP was once nicknamed ‘old clothes Govament’.

Some of the songs created to describe the personality of a candidate were strange in contrast to the real thing. For example I was never able to understand Busta being hailed night after night as “the lilly of the valley, the bright and morning star”. I don’t think Busta did either. On the other hand, he must have liked when the crowd sang “We will follow Bustamante till we die”, or “The Busta power is moving just like a magnet…going here, going there, it movin’ you jus’ like the day of Pentecost”.

Hymn singing was always a good catch to whip up a crowd. So the PNP claimed in 1954 that “I saw Father Manley stretch fort’ di palm of his right han’ to take me across”, and “Go before us Manley, go before us, and do thy work thyself”, while the JLP traditionally opened their meetings with Onward, Christian soldiers and Mine eyes have seen the glory.

When Hugh Shearer led the JLP in a boycott of the opening of Parliament in 1972, the PNP crowd on Duke Street sang: “Shearer in di garden hidin’, hiding’ from Joshua.”

In 1980, a devout Labourite prayer was: “It soon be done, all the troubles and trials, when I get over, on the other side. Ah goin’ to sit down beside Hugh Shearer, talk to Edward Seaga, shake hands with Bustamante, when I get over on the other side.”

Busta was the man to beat in 1944, so the call by the PNP to join up with the Comrades was made through music. Many of these songs made Busta the butt of jokes, hence “Come join di PNP, get Busta out di way, Busta only speculate, An’ we words him underrate.”

The singing followed Busta right through his political life. When he left Western Kingston to run in Clarendon, he had scarcely arrived in that parish before his opponents started yelling: “Where is the Labour leader today. It seems as if he has gone astray, from Kingston he has flown away.”

As a toddler, I recall that Busta’s move to the country seat did make an impression. A song fashioned around a popular calypso said: “Busta run way from Western Kingston, tek whey all a Mass Bedward chicken.” But in spite of all the singing, Busta always won his seat with a runaway majority.

I look forward to some creative songs in next year’s campaign. The JLP’s Deliverance is near in 1980 devastated the PNP. In 1972, the Ethiopians’ Everything crash carried it home for the PNP.

If they try anything with Andrew’s house, he can always respond, “Dry-weather house, don’t worth a cent, an’ you have to pay so much for the rent.”

Lance Neita is a public and community relations consultant and writer. Send comments to: lanceneita@hotmail.com

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