Our extinct volcano

This latest eruption of Soufriere is really hard on the people in St. Vincent, where the economic fallout of Covid 19 has already been taking such a toll. For just days before the eruption, Prime Minister Gonzales warned that the country was in such dire straits that they may not be able to pay civil servants this month.

Aerial view of La Soufriere

The only good news out of St. Vincent so far therefore, is that there are no deaths. It was also encouraging how quickly Caricom countries have responded. I only hope that those who had to leave their island won’t end up like some of their Montserratian neighbors who have never been able to return home since their volcano erupted in 2012.

This event reminded of how surprised I was when I learnt some years that even Jamaica has an extinct volcano. Yes, I think most of us know that all our islands were formed many millions of years ago from underwater eruptions, but those of us in islands that do not have active volcanos, never give any more thought to this normal destructive force.

The first time I ever heard of our extinct volcano at Black hill in Portland, was some time in 2012, on a ride with friends from Kingston to the parish. We had stopped to rest at the top of the hill just beyond Orange Bay, for rest and refreshments. A young man, mistaking us for tourists came up and offered to take us for a tour to the volcano at Black hill where he said you could see evidence of the lava and the denuded hills.

Since I had never heard of it before, I asked him when it erupted, he said; "About 50 years ago." That kept me laughing for the day, for as I told him, if it had erupted 50 years ago, I would have heard about it!

Poor kid, to him 50 years was a lifetime away. Anyway, I decided to research volcanoes in Jamaica and when I could not find anything besides when the island was formed by underwater volcanoes erupting millions of years ago, I forgot about it. Then coincidentally, in 2014, I got an email from the Natural History Society advising of a field trip to the Orange Bay area in Portland. It would be led by Dr. Simon Mitchell, Professor of Sedimentary Geology and Head of the Dept. of Geology and Geography (UWI, Mona). When I saw that we would be climbing the extinct Black Hill volcano, I naturally jumped at the opportunity. This was by far the most informative field trip I had been on for years. We were introduced firsthand, to things like basalt rocks which were formed from the rapid cooling of basaltic lava which had broken down over the years to give places like Orange Bay the black sands. We learned too that Black hill actually got its name because of the color of the rocks there, black because of the high content of iron oxide.  Savanna point below the volcano has adequate evidence of an eruption This extinct volcano, according to Prof Mitchell, was quite "young:" having erupted around 12 million years ago, young because Jamaica was first formed by eruptions some 40 - 50 million years ago. million years ago.  We also learnt that Black Hill was 'discovered" around 1860 when the colonial masters, having lost out their cheap labour after the abolition of slavery, decided to do geological surveys in the colonies to search for precious minerals.  Despite the wealth of information, I gathered from the knowledgeable professor that day, my most interesting lecture that day was on folk lore. This came from a young man named Adrian, who had only recently graduated from Annotto Bay high school. He had come to see what our strange group was doing in the area and joined me under a tree.  His version of the extinct volcano was that it last erupted just as Columbus was approaching the island in 1492 and when he saw the smoke coming out of the mountain, he did not stop in Portland but went to Discovery Bay instead. He said he knew that was the true version as his grandmother had told him so! Anyway, with all the strange things happening in the world because of climate change and all that, I just hope our extinct volcano does not have a rebirth, for hurricanes, earthquakes and viruses are proving to be quite enough for us to handle! (169) Joan Williams, author - YouTube

No Minister Farrakhan

I have always been mesmerized by Minister Louis Farrakhan who I consider one of the greatest orators./ debaters of our time, although I could never endorse his religion which treats women as second class citizens, but that is another matter.

Last weekend at the million man march, Minister  Farrakhan  did not disappoint despite  having reached  the grand old age of 81.

For  man of his depth however, I was disappointed how he allowed himself to be influenced by cheap local rhetoric regrading our maintaining the status quo as regards  the queen of England.

While I support the removal of the British queen and her expensive representative in Jamaica, we need to go much  further to make governance more relevant to our needs, now that we are supposedly independent.

 For to get rid of the queen while holding for dear life to the remnants of colonialism such as the Army, the British devised local government system, Caricom ( the Federation of the former British colonies by the back door ) and the allowing of members of parliament from the commonwealth while banning those who American citizens, can help this country, is in no way progressive or independent.

Take the Local government system as bequeathed by our former colonial masters when it took days to travel from one parish to the next and land phones and other means of communication were in the dark ages, is ridiculous. And who does it benefit? In my book, only the JLP and PNP who get the benefit of having their grass root campaigners financed by taxpayers to the tune of some $4 billion per year. 

Jamaica with its small population, certainly does not need 15 governments and 15 time wasting bureaucracies (14 Local government and one central government) thus using all our resources to pay politicians, consultants and bureaucrats, leaving no or very little resources to build communities. (Incidentally,  the parishes were demarcated in a manner thought best to facilitate the Anglican parishes in the colonies, it had nothing to do with the  the convenience or efficiency of serving the interests the people, as the Anglican church was the official church of the colonizers and the only thing more powerful than that church  then was the monarch).

We should have moved long ago to the concept of three County councils as proposed decades ago after intensitive study, plus local government agencies for the two cities. How much more practical would 6 governments be for a population of 2.7 million as opposed to the 15 we now have?

Then take the army. The British needed a full fledged army to protect their empire in the Caribbean  but where is our empire? (They successfully samfied some colonial minded politicians into accepting the concept of federation to keep the colonies together and we are still holding on to it for dear life via the body called CARICOM) !

We need to restructure the army to serve the interests of the Jamaican people, not to preserve an empire. So what we need is a good coast guard to protect our shores, an efficient engineering corp and an air wing and redirect the billions we are wasting on the infantry which will not even use a couple paint brushes and hammers to fix up the historical site at Newcastle that they occupy.

 Instead the members of the infantry should be invited to join the police force so they can be trained to serve and protect the people of  this nation, not treat us as enemies to be to be cut down, which is what soldiers taught to do.

Then there is his nonsense where members of the commonwealth  including Pakistani Muslims can serve in our parliament and even become prime ministers after residing here for a year while Jamaican who migrate to the US and have gained experience and valuable education are deterred, is absolute madness.

Yes Minister Farrakhan, by all means lets get rid to the Queen of England, her heirs and successors and all she represents, but we need far more than mere superficial tinkering if we are interested in becoming really independent and determined to build this great country into a place where we can live as a proud people.

And by the way, if we are going to remove all vestiges of colonialism, we need to do away with  the "cricket holidays" that bureaucrats still get to go watch that ever so colonial game, with its tea time breaks and all!.

-- 

Top Down Politics

A basic tenet of democracy is that it is the will of the people that  prevails or as Edmund Barton put it, "..creating a nation requires the will of the people".

Here in the Caribbean, we have some leaders trying to create a united states of the Caribbean called Caricom, without the will and consent of the  Jamaican people for if we go back to just over half century ago, it was definitely not the will of the Jamaican people.

However, based on the "school tie concept", some leaders in the English Speaking Caribbean are determined to push the idea of Caribbean unity down our throats even if it chokes us to death, all because the colonizers had left us with the concept of  the British West Indies and West Indies Cricket.  "

While it is true that the people of the eastern Caribbean are one big family and  this even includes people from Guadeloupe and Martinique because of their proximity to the rest, those of us in the western Caribbean have no such ties that bind.

The proximity of these islands mean that when you are born in Grenada, hopping over to school in Trinidad is normal or to Kittitians, having Christmas dinner with relatives in Antigua is the norm etc, so they know each other and are close family, unlike us in the western Caribbean who are virtual strangers apart from the parochial UWI trained politicians.

For the man in the street in Jamaica there is no relationship or even knowledge about  the people or culture in the eastern territories. In fact, many Jamaicans know so little about the other Caricom member countries that it is not unusual to hear my countrymen referring to Guyanese as "small islanders!" Neither do the people of the eastern Caribbean know much about us and some even think of us all as being gun toting , trigger happy people and only realize that the country is relatively peaceful  and we are like them in many ways, when they visit.

It is the fact that we know so little about each other that makes our being a part of Caricom so counterproductive and besides, in terms of trade, we are too far from the eastern Caribbean and their populations too small to make the free trade advantageous to us. In terms of free travel throughout the region, the difficulties we are having in the other territories are mainly because the man in the street knows nothing about us and judge us by the statistics that put us in the top five murder capitals of the world.  That is probably what encourages immigration authorities throughout the region to be wary of those of us carrying Jamaican passports.

In short, until regional unity becomes accepted from the ground level and the UWI school tie clique can prove to us that there are practical benefits and less counterproductive reasons for us to get closer to our eastern Caribbean cousins apart from it being the wish of our leaders, most of us will never willingly accept this shot-gun marriage.

Leadership Crisis

Jamaica has a serious leadership crisis which does not bode well for the future of this beleaguered country at all.

Things  have been made worse by the recent election of Andrew Holness, a Seaga protegee and apparently a follower of Machiavelli, to the leadership of the alternative government, the JLP.  For many people had hoped he being a young man who claimed to be transnational, would have brought some semblance of decently and integrity to the political process as the present government has long proven to be not only incompetent and corrupt but lacking in leadership. For while our first female Prime Minister Portia Simpson is a novelty, that is mainly what she is and in fact is an embarrassment to female leaders throughout the world, who until now, have been far better at governing and leading than their male counterparts.

So that was why all eyes and hope were on the young man, the representative of the new generation. Holness has however has proven to be far too vindictive, petty and totally dishonest to allow us to hold out any hope for this country, for since he won the election, his only mission seems to have been to go after not only those who openly came out in support of his opponent Audley Shaw but also to even punish those who remained silent, leaning neither towards him or Shaw!

Where he struck the nail in his coffin however was by his outright act of dishonesty towards his own colleagues and  party supporters,  showing what he has in store for all  detractors, independent thinkers and persons aligned to the PNP. 

When Holness was first selected JLP leader by the disgraced Bruce Golding in 2011, as per normal, he selected a group of senators to sit in the Upper House. What Jamaica did not know however is that these appointees had been required to demean themselves in exchange for the vaunted job, by giving Holness undated and open letters of resignations.

While it has been revealed that  the unsigned  letters did not state how or when they could be used. Holness had apparently given the senators verbal assurances that they would only be used if any of them opposed the party's stance on having the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) replacing the British Privy Council as Jamaica's Finial Court of Appeal. 

However when two senators Auther Williams and Dr. Chris Tufton refused to obey his unreasonable request for all senators to resign after he was elected Leader, he simply ignored his promise to the two to only use the letters for a specific purpose, dated them and sent them to the governor general!

If that is not a total breach of trust, I certainty do not know what is, but if Jamaicans do not understand by that act, he is totally without scruples, then we are as blind as lambs to the slaughter.

Of course the crisis of leadership in this country has not passed unnoticed by all around us, for, within days, Barbadian Minister of Industry and International Business Domville Innis,  in castigating the Gleaner for an editorial criticising his government, told them to mind their own business and instead pay attention to the  "...rot going on in Jamaica."

Jamaica is indeed the sick man of the Caribbean. 

We Don't Need The Caribbean Court of Justice

As we  in Jamaica celebrate our fiftieth year as an independent nation, why can't we get it right?

Here we are rightly moving full speed to get rid of the monarchy and all other vestiges of that system including the privy council, then what do we do? Opt to make another external entity, the CCJ our final court!!

I make no bones about the fact that I am no regionalist and I totally respect for the decision that the people made in 1961 and therefore object strongly to all the moves being made to establish federation through the back door. The plain truth however is that all the attempts over the years have not worked for look at how Jamaicans are treated when they go to the other islands.

Just this week too I heard someone from the private sector on radio saying that their organisation has just set about doing been a cost benefit analysis of our relationship with Caricom. I suppose if we did not have a trade deficit of close to a billion dollars, they would  never have seen this as a basic necessity.

The fact is, Caricom only benefits the politicians and bureaucrats who gather to have a whale of a time at the various talk shops as they make decisions that affect our lives adversely and make no attempt to explain the implications of these decisions.

As far as I am concerned it was nothing but the anti-Jamaican bias that is prevalent in the region which led to not even one Jamaican judge being selected to sit on the CCJ when it was first established although we had to pay the largest fraction of the initial costs.

Anyway, the fact is we have extremely qualified and competent jurists right here and if we are really interested in true independence, as we talk about divorce from the Privy council, we would not be looking at half steps but would move full speed ahead to deal with the matter properly and in the interest of the Jamaican people, as part of our 50th anniversary celebrations.

  Let us have our own final court of appeal right here and what the heck, we can hire judges from other territories if the need arises, as it does in other professions from time to time.

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Suriname

If you are planning a trip to South America, forget Paramaribo!

Naturally that is my opinion and if someone had said that to me, I would have ignored the advice! You see, I have to learn everything for myself! 

Supposedly the largest wooden church in the world.

 Seriously though, unless one is interested in seeing some nice Dutch Colonial Architecture, poverty and underdevelopment, Paramaribo can easily be overlooked. Actually, it is not as poor as Haiti and come to think of it, I did not even see one beggar but while you can visit Haiti , check into an all inclusive and have a wonderful time on the white sand beaches  on a beautiful Caribbean coast and never know that poverty was the order of the day, Paramaribo is not like that. True they do have a small resort where you find Eco inn, Terrica etc. but in Caribbean terms, they are way behind.

I get the impression of poverty there because of the proliferation of derelict looking wooden houses. Granted some of them has expensive looking Japanese cars parked in front or even inside the yard but I still get the impression of poverty. Or maybe they are not really poor but just not into houses. I never went inside one so can't say for sure. But this is the first time in the 21st century that I have been to a city and seen so many derelict looking wood houses with dirt lawns and dirt sidewalks, not even a blade of grass anywhere.

Paramaribo is of course the capital of Suriname, the smallest sovereign state in south America. It is approximately 64,000 square metres with a population of just over half million. It is very much like its neighbor Guyana in terms of climate, religion, proliferation of rivers, population make up and terrain although much more of Suriname is virgin territory, 90% I am told. Also, like Guyana, no retailer takes the mighty US$ and Jamaican music, especially dancehall is king. I was totally amused to hear Vybes Kartel music being played at a store in Paramaribo which sells Hindu paraphernalia including religious material!)

A moslem temple in Paramaribo

To get there we travelled east on excellent roads for about 3 hours to the Berbice bridge. It was when we were in New Amsterdam that I realised for the first time that Guyana once had a motor vehicle industry, for all over the place we saw a vehicle shaped like a fully covered Land Rover being used as taxis. I learnt that when  Guyana had its socialist experiment like we did in Jamaica and there was a shortage of cars, the enterprising 'Guyanese made the Tapir and twenty years later a number of them are still in very active use in the Berbice county.  After crossing the Berbice bridge, we took a ferry at Molson creek to Suriname.(You know when you are in Guyana however by the proliferation of animals on the roads, something you don't see in Suriname.) One does not have to take the ferry however as there are speed boats which also take passengers from one side to the other as there is a great deal of traffic between the both countries, despite the fact that in Suriname most people speak a dialect called Tacky Tacky, a mixture of Dutch, African  dialects. English ....everything. Anyway, most people there speak English to some degree.

Ready to board the ferry at Molson Creek

Then we travelled about 3 hours, excellent roads, scenic country side but far less developed and populated than Guyana, to Paramaribo.
 Paramaribo like Georgetown is not into zoning, so houses and business places exist side by side all over. However while in Georgetown the wooden houses are being replaced at a rapid rate and are rarely seen in the commercial areas, the opposite is true in Paramaribo.

On a morning walk I saw smoke coming out of one of the wooden houses and people frantically kicking in the doors before realising that the place was on fire. I expected  the wooden house to go up in smoke as well as the other two other wooden structures on either side but I must say, their firefighting ability far exceeds ours. For withing 5 minutes 4 fire trucks and dozens of police were on the scene. Within minutes a truck with water was there too but it was not needed and a few minutes later another fire truck arrived.

I was absolutely amazed how quickly they got that fire under control and saved everything else. I guess when you have that many wooden structures you really have develop great fire fighting strategies. Another thing I found interesting was the  many sidewalks which were mainly cobblestone and very wide. It didn't take me long to realise however that they were not only for pedestrians but also bicycles and motor bikes and cars parked all over them too.

What I found most amazing about Paramaribo was the number of casinos, from Royal Princess hotel Casinos and Best Western to non- chain hotels. but they all seemed greatly under utilised!

I just could not come to terms with the underdevelopment of the place considering they export bauxite, agriculture (we saw thousands of acres of rice on the way) and oil. Of course it could be because of the politics as my short visit there gave me some serious insights into the place.

Board houses like these are all over commercial districts

I have long been curious about how Desi Bouterse could have become President after the 2010 elections and even more amazed that he could have been accepted as Chairman of Caricom, considering his credentials. But after hearing the serious allegations about his predecessor,  if these are true, I can see why he could be acceptable to the Surinamese people. (I still can't see how he could be acceptable to Caricom leaders however).

At this time, it seems the Chinese are having a serious influence on Suriname and hardly a corner you pass that does not have a retail outlet with Chinese writing on it. It is alleged that the Surinamese, even the Chinese born are resenting this invasion and they blame the former president who is reputed to have taken away unused land and given the foreign Chinese titles for those properties, making a lot of money for himself privately. When the native owners saw structures going up on their land and checked, they found that their titles were no longer any good! Now such a scenario could really make someone like Bouterse look good although in early 1980 he had led a military coup which overthrew the democratic government and declared a socialist republic.

In what is now recognised as an infamous period, on 8 December 1982, the military under his leadership, rounded up several prominent citizens who were accused of plotting against the government and executed them during the night.

Where the "enemies of the state" were executed.

You know, the late, great Motty Perkins used to say that if robbers could make the law, stealing would not be a crime. 

 Well, I understood the full implications of this in Suriname, for while Bouterse and other officials are currently standing trial for the December murders of 1982, (the trial started in 2007 but has been stalled for several reasons), on April 5th 2012, the government (headed by Bouterse) passed an Amnesty law giving immunity to persons who committed   Human Rights violations between April 1, 1980 and August 19, 1992. 

Naturally the United Nations Human Rights Commission has objected to the legislation, but this seems to have no effect in Suriname or with Caricom Leaders. 

Further, although Bouterse was convicted in absentia in the Netherlands for drug smuggling, this too has had no effect on the electorate or our brave Caribbean leaders.

The president's mansi

Interestingly, I was told by a supporter of his  that the only reason why the Netherlands Government came after him was because he had been acting as their agent in 1980 when he led the coup and he should have neutralized the country's independence status and put the Dutch back in control of the country. (they gained independence from the Dutch in 1975) but he double crossed them.

Boy from what I have seen and heard here about Surinamese politics, all things are possible!

Mr. Patterson,s Tenure

I found the article in the of Gleaner of 29th June 29, entitled “Patterson to receive region’s highest honour” quite enlightening and I wonder if the entire Jamaican population should not be thinking on these things, so to speak.

According to the article “Former Prime Minister PJ Patterson , an avid cricket fan, (my emphasis)leaves the island tomorrow for the opening ceremony of the 30th meeting of the region’s heads, where he will receive the Order of the Caribbean Community”. When one reads this article and recalls the comments made buy his former Minister of Industry Claude Clarke in the article published in the Gleaner of the 14th June 2009, entitled “Caricom: killing us softly” and recall the over $300 million which it was revealed last week that we now have to “hug up” from the cricket world cup fiasco, one cannot but wonder if Mr. Patterson’s term as prime minister of Jamaica was not overall more beneficial to Caricom than to Jamaica. No wonder the honour!