Dear Editor,
There must be many of us who are as befuddled as the officials who gratuitously utter words without providing information, or who when they do offer some information, would not elucidate on how they themselves can utilise it.
So when one listens to crime and accident statistics being blandly regurgitated one becomes interested enough to enquire of the accompanying analysis of the reported incidences that would inform a responsive action plan at least, since there is clearly no strategic plan.
Who was it that said that commonsense is the rarest sense of all?
For example, one would expect that the concerned officials would have long ago developed a map on which is displayed the distinctive areas of high, medium and low incidence of the identified categories of criminal activity, the respective target areas, and the timings of the occurrences, to ascertain what trends there might be. Just a thought!
Obviously there would be more angles, but we do not appear to have the level of operational intelligence so standard in other jurisdictions in the Region; for example, why do they not rise above the suffocation in which they were engulfed by the former administration and send personnel for relevant overseas education and training of the sort for which, incidentally, the GDF is given preference.
At the moment the latter’s counterpart still suffers from the effective psychological emasculation of previous decades, and has not yet adjusted to the open demand to think outside the box.
But then one is not quite sure who does, when at one and the same time one is enlightened of, and depressed by, the news that November 2015 marked the most violent road safety month for the year. This coming upon the reams of platitudes spelt out to mark the beginning of that fatal month. No one has since mourned the fatalities, or has been reported to have confronted the hapless survivors of the victims.
Meanwhile there appears to be this fatalistic resignation to what is in fact the eminently avoidable decimation of our population. The platitudinists prefer to rename roads, however potholed they may be, rather than rebuild them. This considerable engineering default is one contributory factor to the rampaging motor vehicle accident rate.
One other is the Traffic Chief’s stubborn resistance to erecting ample upright road signages to which only the 50th anniversary diasporean celebrants are accustomed. The dim road lighting in critical areas also needs to be urgently assessed for repair. Imagine, for example, the darkness through which international and local passengers are propelled to access the Ogle International Airport – a roadway along which poor pedestrians and cyclists are known to be assaulted and robbed – a haunting exposure that would not be assuaged by renaming the facility.
Meanwhile, the ingenuousness motors on, and all types of vehicles, from the smallest private car or taxi, compete with the massive container and other transport vehicles trundling at the same speed, that is if at all they observe the speed limit.
But then all public transporters are aided and abetted by those officers who offer them licences at dealers’ prices.
In this connection I would be grateful to have explained what the process is which allows dealers in motorcycles to offer free licences to purchasers.
Yours faithfully,
E B John