Perhaps the most destructive feature of black history is the prevailing litany of falsehoods and myths that have hindered the development of our people and the lands they inhabit. Over 250 years after the African scholar and diplomat Edward Blyden challenged the theories of black inferiority, Donald Trump’s USA is still mired in a perilous assault for white supremacy and domination.

Even more profound, it was the sociologist W E B Dubois, the first black man to receive a doctorate from Harvard University, the pre-eminent pan-Africanist and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who a century ago made the case for black legitimacy in America, forcefully disputing the white man’s claim of original habitation, now a central pillar of Trump’s America.

Wrote Dubois: “Before the pilgrims landed we were here, here we have brought the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundation of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it.”

A central tactic in the maintenance of white supremacy and the re-election of a failed president is the crafting of an alternative reality — a denial of economic disaster, a mismanaged national pandemic, racism, unjustified police killings, and stifled social protest.

Here in Jamaica on a less disguised, but even more insidious plain, one Fabian Lewis, in an August 25, 2020 letter to the editor published in the Jamaica Observer, ‘PNP housing plan is Operation PRIDE 2.0, garrisonisation’, has sought to rebuke Damion Crawford for his reference to Operation PRIDE (Programme for Resettlement and Integrated Development Enterprise) in the roll-out of the PNP’s 2020 land and housing programme. Without, research or any semblance of due diligence, Lewis proceeded to spread misinformation and hearsay in a false narrative that belies the essence of Operation PRIDE.

He offers the auditor general’s 1997 report on the programme to underpin his falsehoods, long after the same offerings by Observer columnist Garfield Higgins had been fully dispelled. Let us go to the facts:

1) The 1997 auditor general’s report were mainly based on allegations by a dismissed employee who had sought to replace allottees at the Pines of Karachi Project. These allegations were subject to examination at a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) hearing chaired by Audley Shaw.

2) The deliberations which are acridly recorded by Hansard speak to a vastly different outcome than the pronouncements of the writer.

3) As with Lewis, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and others, including the People’s National Party (PNP), there has been total ignorance as to the modus of the programme. At the PAC hearings it was brought out that the community-based registered provident societies established under the programme could, in fact, treat legally with their own selected contractors. This was not only justified by Cabinet approval and the minister of housing, as corporation sole under the Housing Act, but more pointedly preliminary contract funding came from beneficiary deposits and sweat equity.

4) These preliminary contracts involving very basic infrastructure were later augmented by variations costed by registered quantity surveyors to include costings for proper sewage disposal, water supply, roads and drainage, designed by civil engineers to be funded by Government and repaid from beneficiaries’ National Housing Trust (NHT) contributions or other mortgage payments. This was only one source of the mysterious “disparity in rates” to which Lewis refers.

5) Lewis missed the central evidence proferred by the JLP at the PAC, that is, Bushy Park, a PRIDE project on flat lands in St Catherine, reflected inflated prices akin to a hilly site. It can be fully verified by Hansard that the hearing ended shortly after, as it was revealed that Bushy Park, Clarendon – a hilly site — was, in fact, the PRIDE site and not the private property in St Catherine examined by the auditor general’s team.

6) Further evidence from the registrar showed that there were 45 registered provident societies properly accredited to undertake their own development; and not 12, as was alleged.

Additionally, the $2 billion written off by the Government is pure nonsense; similar to Higgins’ “$5-billion scandal” relating to projects expenditure projected but not done. The tenets of the programme spoke to incremental development with Government injections to complete infrastructural works, titling, and mortgage payouts. It was the job of PRIDE officers to prepare beneficiaries for NHT funding, the later dereliction of which under the JLP could account for any such “write-offs”.

Our national tendency to promote Anancyism, myths, and gossip has also inflicted Lewis in his citing of 87 counts of frauds perpetrated by usurpers and opportunists from a unit in the Ministry of Housing (Caribbean Engineering Company Ltd) outside the ambit of Operation PRIDE – an instance of propaganda as causation for underdevelopment.

It should be acknowledged, however, that the provision of environmental decency on “brownfield squatter sites” that litter our nation remains a regularisation challenge for all governments. To date, the only successful model of redress remains Operation PRIDE, which has delivered 30,010 titles at 2005, many of which were handed over by the JLP Government, and 20,000 letters of possession, evidenced the greatest instance of land reform in the Western world.

It is this continuing challenge of security of tenure, economic upliftment, and change among our 360,000 squatter population that Damion Crawford sought to confront. Nowhere in the recent history of PRIDE condemnations have the perpetrators informed themselves by a visit to a PRIDE project and enquired of its prior status.

What was the situation at the Pines of Karachi before Operation PRIDE placed the workers of this country on that reserved enclave of Beverly Hills? And what of Wellington Glades, College Green, Mona Commons, Blue Castle Close (Kingston and St Andrew), projects built under the PNP that the JLP’s Fayval Williams proudly announced her membership in their respective citizens’ associations?

The detractors know not of the challenges we faced from the ‘cutlass men’ who would not yield one inch of Crown lands they did not own. And what of the capital appreciation we have witnessed today on those sites, in addition to others such as Bel Air (St Ann), Barrett Hall (St James), Clover (Mandeville), and Luana (St Elizabeth), but fail to acknowledge the tortuous steps that made it so. And, yes, Whitehall (Negril), with its 3,000 developed solutions that allowed for the environmental survival of the adjacent Great Morass, which also offers soil conditions for the best strain of cannabis in the world.

Perhaps if we end point-scoring and seek to learn from the missteps and achievements of Operation PRIDE we just might begin to find answers to the critical issues of informality, inequality and environmental decadence, which will no doubt dramatically reduce crime and violence.

Paul Buchanan is a former national co-ordinator of Operation PRIDE and one-term Member of Parliament for St Andrew West Rural.