'God' Buck Him Toe!

Common Sense
John Maxwell

I was talking to man who works as a waiter in a Kingston hotel. "You know," he said, "there are people who would rather knock you down in the street than risk their expensive car being damaged by a pothole. Rather than hitting the pothole they will hit you and drive off - figuring the cops will never trace them.

"They don't realise that they should be nice to the people they meet on the way up because they're going to meet them again on the way down."

I'm not sure that I have the same faith in divine justice as he, but I couldn't help thinking about what he said as I watched the images of Israel's destruction of Lebanon and Palestine and read about the unravelling of the power of the man many in Jamaica have for the past several years referred to only half-jokingly as 'God'.

Israel is spending a great deal of time, effort and money in buying itself enemies. People on the Jamaican streets, knowing what I do for a living, come up to me and ask me to explain what's going on in the Middle East. And they are not just seeking my opinion, they are giving me theirs.

The major question is why Israel believes it makes sense to slaughter hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese civilians in the effort to recover three Israeli soldiers captured by Palestinians and by Hezbollah. It seemed totally out of proportion to them.

The Israelis wouldn't be doing it, they tell me, if the Americans weren't giving them the money and the arms to do it. "Don't they believe," they ask, "that one day the money will come to an end? That one day the shoe might be on the other foot?"

Jamaicans have always had a lively and intelligent interest in what happens in the rest of the world. In small countries, people tend to be very attentive to anything that might conceivably affect them; the behaviour of our powerful neighbour to the north is one such factor, partly because Jamaicans realise that we could not possibly defend ourselves against any attack from that quarter, but also because most Jamaicans have a - fast disappearing - tradition of respect and affection for the USA. There are so many Jamaicans there. Many Jamaicans serve and have served in the US armed forces.

In my daily peregrinations I increasingly encounter people who formerly would have been partisans of the United States. I meet them in supermarkets and such places, middle-aged, middle-class women who want to know why the US believes that it makes sense to be buying new enemies, as one put it to me last week. I had not realised how many Palestinians there are in Jamaica and how many of them - who are mainly middle- and upper-class - hate the United States.

"Buying enemies" is an apt description of the process. They see the destruction of Palestine as a process which began 60 years ago, when some of them were first displaced. They know that their ancestors had given shelter and succour to the Jews and do not understand why Middle Eastern people should now be paying for the sins of European racists.

And they tell me that they think the Israelis are behaving just like the Nazis who persecuted and murdered them by the millions not so long ago. Although few of them are Muslim and most are Christian, Jamaican Palestinian and Lebanese people identify strongly with the Islamic resistance to Israeli hegemony. One businessman told me a few months ago that the memories of Palestinians are just as long as the memories of the Jews. "We still remember Saladin," he said.

And he reminded me that 60 years ago, people like Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin were officially described by the British as terrorists; just as Hamas and Hezbollah are now described by the Americans, the British and the Israelis. And, don't even begin to talk about Iraq!

Some Palestinian, Lebanese and other Middle Eastern people in Jamaica muse on the cost of the current destruction - wouldn't the money spent on missiles and bombs, on F-16s and missile-firing warships make more sense being spent on the development of the whole area?

Wouldn't it make Israel safer if they were to try buying friends rather than enemies? Wouldn't it be cheaper?

And my Middle Eastern friends, turning away from the United States, slowly but increasingly more surely, have a particular contempt for the American Press. My businessman friend asked me to explain what was the essential difference between CNN and Pravda or Izvestia? Even the British BBC, he said, could no longer be trusted.

'God' buck him toe!

The major Jamaican story of the week (and of several weeks to come) is the scandal surrounding the Sandals Whitehouse hotel development.

The Urban Development Corporation (UDC), which has never been about urban development, is now at the centre of a dispute about their management of the construction of a hotel on Jamaica's south coast, which was supposed to inaugurate a new era in Jamaican tourism. The hotel was being built for the Sandals group, headed by 'Butch' Stewart, who also happens to be the owner of this newspaper.

Several months ago, it transpired that Sandals and the UDC were involved in a dispute about who was responsible for horrendous cost overruns in the construction of the hotel. The project was originally scheduled to cost about US$70 million. The final cost is somewhere north of US$110 million, a cost overrun of more than 60 per cent.

I do not have the space to go into the details of the corporate arrangements surrounding the project management, except to say that, according to 'Butch' Stewart, the Sandals group, who were supposed to be joint venture partners, were never made aware of the exact financial position.

Despite trying to find out what was the position, Sandals kept getting the run-around from the UDC and its nominee on site, a project management company headed by Mr Alston Stewart, a journalist and public relations practitioner who suddenly became an all-purpose expert, running the National Solid Waste Management Authority as well as the Sandals Whitehouse construction project.

The contractor-general's office has now issued a report on the Sandals project, and the contents so far are mind-boggling. According to the contractor-general, the UDC has been unco-operative in providing the facts required for a proper investigation of the scheme. It is apparently at this moment, impossible to accurately trace what happened to nearly US$40 million.

As in every story, there are several sides. In this case, the contractor-general insists that the UDC had contravened the Government's mandatory requirements for the procurement of services and goods, including the hiring of consultants. The UDC, on the other hand, says that it has provided full access to all the information it has in its possession and that the contractor-general had never asked for additional information, nor did he indicate dissatisfaction with the quality or timeliness of the information provided.

One of the more curious aspects has been the contention of Vin Lawrence that government guidelines about the hiring of consultants were not in place when he hired them for the project. Whether there were guidelines or not, wouldn't any sensible businessman make sure that the process was transparent and ethical? You don't need official guidelines for that.

The Sandals group, through director Chris Zacca, who is also deputy chairman of the Observer newspaper, says the contractor-general was misinformed about the part Sandals' affiliates played, but the group shared the concerns expressed by the C-G about the lack of transparency and accountability in the construction project. They have promised their side of the story shortly.

All of this seems to lead inevitably to the former chairman of the UDC, the man formerly known as 'God' - the man some believed was the real deputy prime minister to Mr Patterson - Vin Lawrence Jnr. While Mr Patterson reigned, it was said, Mr Lawrence ruled. He was the man to see if you wanted anything done. Without his say-so, supplicants could wait a very long time.

My own problems with Mr Lawrence were simpler. The word "Environment" was to him an incendiary device, and he made sure that 'development' - as the UDC saw it - had nothing to do with sustainability or the Precautionary Principle.

Thirty years ago, long before Mr Lawrence became chairman of the UDC, I convinced Michael Manley to hand over a portion of the Hellshire (Halfmoon Bay) beach to the fishermen who had originally colonised it. It seemed to me that in addition to their fishing they should also be permitted to run the beach as a public recreational park, and initially, 32 acres were set aside for this.

The UDC, led by Moses Matalon, then chairman, and Gloria Knight, managing director, fought every step of the way to prevent the transfer of ownership. The original 32 acres were cut to 10.

They also fought my proposal to accept the advice of a high-level UWI scientific team that Hellshire should be handled with kid gloves because it was ecologically important, sensitive and potentially a huge scientific and touristic asset if properly protected.

The UDC saw Hellshire as another step in the urbanisation of Jamaica concentrated on Kingston and premised on massive hotel developments. I was famously denounced as a dreamer for saying that iguanas still existed in Hellshire. They were wrong.

The UWI and the NRCA (of which I was chair at the time) were happy to give up eastern Hellshire to housing but wanted the rest of it for a wilderness park and a scientific reserve. There was space, we thought, for all of this in Hellshire's 17 square miles.

In the first place, the UDC refused to surrender its claims to Halfmoon Bay, allowing the construction of a monstrous edifice on the western side of the beach and sending in bulldozers to flatten the houses of the fishermen. They were squatters, the UDC said.
It was only later, two years ago, that the Hellshire Bay community learned that even while the UDC had been demolishing their houses, the title for the land had already been passed from the UDC to the fishermen's co-operative. The UDC was in fact criminally trespassing on their land.

Mr Lawrence was chair of the UDC at this time, and after the demolitions he undertook an eventually fruitless attempt to get the fishermen to surrender their land in exchange for 30 or so barrack houses away from the beach.

It took us nearly 30 years to get what had been promised by Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica, in 1978. Since then, the UDC has gone from strength to strength. It has claimed that the 50-year leases granted to farmers on the Winnifred Beach property at Fairy Hill in Portland are null and void. It has better things to do with the land and the beach.

The UDC intends to wall off the beach and the property from Jamaica, to make it an exclusive ghetto for foreigners. The same solution is to be applied to the Trelawny coastline, taking away public beaches for the pleasure of the UDC's rich friends abroad.

If the UDC were allowed to continue its mad career, pretty soon Jamaicans won't be able to find a decent public beach in their own country.

There cannot be a better reason for the prime minister to order an immediate and full-scale forensic audit of the UDC as a preliminary to abolishing the corporation in the public interest.

No accountability for decades

In 1973, I was invited to a press conference by the then minister of mining and natural resources, Allan Isaacs, to hear about the UDC's plan to rebuild downtown Kingston. During the course of the press conference I asked Mr Matalon whether I could have the UDC's last annual report. It wasn't available yet, I was told. Could I have the previous annual report? That too was unavailable. Could I have any of the corporation's annual reports? None were available.

Allan Isaacs, listening to this exchange with bafflement and increasing fury, asked Moses Matalon whether the UDC had published any annual reports since its inception five years before? Matalon said 'no'. Isaacs then ordered the UDC to let him have the annual reports on his desks within some reasonable time, and the press conference was at an end.

Several weeks later, the UDC produced a document which was said to contain the annual reports from 1968 to 1973. Among other things it revealed that the UDC had been financing itself with promissory notes from local and foreign banks, all without the knowledge of the ministry of finance. It would be interesting to discover how many other annual reports have been published since 1973.

Since then, the UDC has, instead of urban development, gone into the business of property development. It has built two condo hotels - Seacastles and Sandcastles - and earns a substantial but undisclosed share of its revenue from the (US$) fees it charges at the Dunn's River Falls.

Nobody really knows what the UDC is up to. What we do know is that it is not, in any sense, an Urban Development Corporation.