Several talking points have arisen out of government’s announcement that it would commit half of the one billion dollar coastal clean-up allocation to rehabilitating the capital. In March, Mayor Hamilton Green dismissed it as an election gimmick, his Deputy, Patricia Chase-Green described the amount as a “teardrop,” a reference to what she believes is the inadequacy of the allocation. Then, of course, there is the issue of whether or not those sums ought not to be properly assigned to the municipality. That is not an immediately resolvable issue. Hopefully, local government elections will settle, among other things, the proper allocation of amounts for works deemed to be the responsibility of the municipality. Finally, there is the issue of whether the execution of the exercise should be assigned to the municipality or ‘hived off’ to the private sector. That would appear to have been already decided.
$500 million is not anywhere near enough to do a thorough job on the capital’s Augean Stables. We know, for example, of the City Engineer’s estimate of $1 billion to render the city’s drainage system effective. We know too that the municipality is not ideally positioned to execute the project as effectively as we would have liked (even though it has the institutional memory and can play an important role in the exercise) and perhaps Mayor Green is correct about it being an election gimmick. What, however, cannot be denied is what Minister Norman Whittaker said about the capital being in need of some sort of rehabilitation effort, particularly in the area of solid waste management.
Since the die would would appear to be cast, the best option, it seems, is to press ahead, prudently, with using the $500 million to help bring about a measure of positive transformation in the capital.
Two points should be made at this juncture. First, we are yet to learn about the envisaged scope of the undertaking. Minister Whittaker, in a pronouncement in March appeared to identify the solid waste problem as one that might come under particular scrutiny during the clean-up/rehabilitation exercise. Greater clarity regarding the scope of the work to be done is important particularly given the fact that the amount of money available falls decidedly short of what it would take to do a thorough rehabilitation job.
A second and equally important issue has to do with how the work will be executed. As was mentioned earlier, even if questions of capacity and competence arise in relation to the city council, that is no reason why it should be excluded from the exercise altogether. As Deputy Mayor Chase-Green pointed out in March, any rehabilitation work must be attended by a sustainability plan and such a plan will have to be implemented and sustained by the municipality. Another good reason for a municipality role is the decided inexperience of the private sector in this particular field.
And if the concerns over public sector accountability expressed year-in, year-out by the Auditor General are to mean anything, there is clearly a need – again in the context of the paucity of the sum assigned for the exercise – for there to be some measure of reliable oversight that seeks to guard against nepotism, fraud, inexplicable overpayments and the various other scourges that often afflict state-funded projects. After all, surely, in a matter like the badly needed rehabilitation of our capital there is need to avoid the kind of profligate spending and the misdirection of funds that could cause the exercise to fall flat on its face.
If ever an exercise cried out for community involvement it is this one. Volunteerism can help volunteers value their effort and cause them to want to play a role in ensuring sustainability. Here, there may well be a strong case for professionally supervised and supported community-based clean-ups, with financial allocations for appropriate and affordable incentives in poor communities, More than that there is the potential for involving social, cultural and religious organizations with their capacity to mobilize both the numbers and the enthusiasm for a project of this kind.
What the government must not do is to turn this exercise into a kind of one-man show that makes spectators of the rest of us and reduces the value that we attach to the finished product.
Community solid waste management and environmental programmes have been implemented with considerable success in societies as socially, culturally and politically different as the Nether-lands, Ecuador and Tanzania, which proves the point that a common interest in creating a more convivial environment can supersede differences and bring people together. If we can muster that spirit we may well be able to take the first steps towards restoring our capital.
