Dear Editor,

On reading the news that businesses at the Wicky Wacky Plaza in Bull Bay, St Thomas, will be displaced by the new south coast highway, I was hardly surprised. However, I do want to note, for the record, that Wicky Wacky Plaza is really at Eight Miles not Eleven Miles as suggested by your newspaper. I notice that newspapers these days hardly make an effort to accurately locate the geographical areas on which they report. Oh well, so much for Jamaican journalists being bastions of accuracy.

For years I have made the point that Jamaica was in dire need of a national spatial plan, and the Government recently – maybe that was a few years ago – made the announcement that a national spatial plan was in the works and was to be completed by a foreign firm. Oh well, so much for local planning.

Now that the new South Coast Highway is underway, it seems that the road is the priority, not the community. Residents of Eight Miles will soon have a spanking new four-lane highway running between the beaches. The business owners at the Wicky Wacky Plaza will have to reconvene at some other location to sell their bottled water, ice cream, and hardware. The one medical office will have to move, and I wonder where they will move to? Truckers, though, will have a field day; I can hardly wait, maybe we can all open truck stops to sell them lunch and dinners.

The Government, it seems, has no use for us little people who pay the taxes that pay their salaries or they would have noticed that this area needs all the services provided by the business places that operate at this little plaza. Perhaps the redeployment of these much-needed services is as a result of a foreign planner doing the national spatial plan.

The ongoing mining of the limestone between Seven and Eight miles will soon open up new vistas of the blue mountain range from the shores of Bull Bay, and the authorities say that the mining is being done according to their lease. It seems that the intent of the lease is to remove the hill altogether. Hooray for the miners and the authorities! It is of note that all the rivers running through Bull Bay have been flooding their banks after the river courses were blocked by debris from the mining activities, and the authorities will tell you that they have always been mining according to their lease. Oh well, I guess this is “how the thing set”.

Living in Jamaica for most Jamaicans is like “death by a thousand cuts”. Daily, there are little things that cause the population to become stressed, like the lack of inclusiveness in matters that affect us, the lack of meaningful jobs, the lack of economic opportunities, and the extravagance of government ministers and other politicians, followed by the “hush, never mind” from those who never had to eat chicken back or foot or raised their children in shacks with sewage flowing in their yard. What is an ordinary Jamaican to do? Many have resigned themselves to the fate of being a Jamaican, some are fighting a mighty battle against the duppies we call Government – only visible before elections – and those for whom Jamaica is “Bird Cherry Island”. Oh well, there is really nothing we can do.

So we pray that the ‘rulers’ get vision and ask for divine intervention from their uselessness, while we fight each other and stare at the rising temperatures of both the society and the climate until we start the fight again for the chicken back and foot. Oh, what great progress…from slavery to impoverishment.

God help us.

Hugh M Dunbar

hmdenergy@gmail.com