Drumroll! Ring the bells. Hoist the banners. Send out the cheerleaders. Do the happy dance. Le Repentir Cemetery is going to be cleaned again. Over the next six months, it has been announced, government will spend more than $100 million to make the cemetery conducive to burials again.
But wait. Wasn’t this said and done before? Wasn’t that disgraceful, overgrown, nasty plot of land where many city residents are forced to bury their dead cleaned up before?
Of course it was. In 2011, the Ministry of Public Works, even though Minister Robeson Benn had made it clear that his ministry was not responsible for the maintenance of the cemetery, had spent $15 million to clear most of the thick vegetation. The minister had made a point of informing this newspaper, after the activity was noticed and attributed to the Mayor and City Council (M&CC), that it was in fact the ministry that was responsible for the much needed action.
He had revealed that an excavator had been cleaning canals and clearing trails. Further, Project Engineer Lloyda Rollins had indicated that the ministry was to have purchased equipment to aid in cutting down the trees, clearing the thick bushes and removing some 200 colonies of bees.
In 2009, the M&CC had announced that it had earmarked $32 million to maintain the cemetery and that this sum would be needed on an annual basis to keep Le Repentir in a decent state. Unfortunately, the council’s records revealed that it only collected $12 million a year in revenue from the cemetery. What was obvious, even given the huge anomaly in receipts and payments was that none of the money collected was being spent on the cemetery. If it were, while it would not have been in tip-top shape, it could never have deteriorated to its current state.
The next year, 2010, a group of about ten prisoners were seen at odd intervals with cutlasses, clearing some of the bushes. Although anyone who has seen Le Repentir knows that they could just as easily have been using nail scissors for all the impact that would have made.
In fact, the effort by the Ministry of Public Works in 2011 was the only one in about a decade that provided any tangible results. However, a few months after the clean-up ended and the contractors left, things were basically back to square one.
The reason being of course that there was no real continuity plan. Minister Benn had been quoted as saying that after the ministry cleaned the cemetery the onus would be on the M&CC to maintain it. Of course, the minister’s remark was disingenuous. City Hall had already said one year prior to this that it had a $20 million deficit with regard to the cemetery. In addition, it was struggling with paying garbage collection contractors and its own staff. It had not maintained Le Repentir in over a decade, how was it suddenly going to start doing so now?
So that $15 million was basically buried at Le Repentir, just like the freshly painted tombs that are laid in cleared patches that quickly become swallowed up by the rampaging vegetation.
This year the sum is much grander – $100 million. Of course the funds required for the work that needs to be done if Le Repentir is to be restored to anything close to its former glory as a resting place for our dearly departed, are more than 15 times the $15 million that was spent in 2011.
Before the tall trees and thick overgrowth can be removed, the contractor/s might do well to have beekeepers harvest the numerous hives known to be in the cemetery. The bordering trenches/canals/ drains at Sussex, Princes, St Stephen and Cemetery roads will have to be desilted along with the smaller drains in the cemetery itself. Walkways/paths and bridges to the various burial sites will need upgrading and the roads inside the cemetery resurfaced. The gates need attention and ideally the cemetery should be completely fenced to deter the type of nefarious activity that has become rampant there at night over the years. Aside from the breaking into tombs and graves by thieves and the harvesting of wrought iron to be sold to scrap metal dealers, too many bodies of missing persons have turned up dumped in Le Repentir. And who knows how many more secrets it might reveal if it were properly cleaned?
However, while the clearing of the cemetery is needed and welcomed, experience has taught us that no one-off effort will be good enough. There must be a long-term plan for maintenance. And since, as Minister Benn has adamantly said in the past, the upkeep of Le Repentir is not within the purview of the Public Works Ministry, the key would be to hold local government elections so that a new accountable group of city ‘fathers and mothers’ can take charge.
