Ronald Thwaites | ‘Dem tek wi fi eediat’

That was the pithy conclusion of the lady trying to negotiate the new immigration procedures for persons entering Jamaica. My own experience forces me to sympathise. There used to be the form given you on the airplane which when completed and presented with passport to an immigration officer, gained you admission. Many times you had to assist persons whose “eyes were dark” or had “forgotten their glasses” to fill out the form. The waiting time in the immigration hall was occasioned not by the process as by the insufficient number of officers on duty.

Now there is a mandatory online process where on repeated efforts to access the portal I had to fight off the interposing hawks who offer to do the task if you pay them a fee. Look here, there should be no cost to re-enter one’s own country!

MORE PROCESS

After a grandchild assisted several people to complete the form, you had to satisfy a genial gentleman on the concourse that you had followed the procedure. Another point of congestion. Followed by having to confront a machine which is supposed to scan you and your documents. At least half of the machines I approached were not working. With the help of one of the same type of officers who used to get you through in a two-minute process, permission to enter was finally granted, the paper evidence of which had to be inspected by yet another invigilator before one could access the customs hall.

In the interests of efficiency, we have replaced one process with four stages. The lady was right. “Dem tek wi fi eediat”. Time is lost, aggravation is unavoidable and productivity is compromised. And please, what is the benefit of being able to complete the electronic form up to 30 days before attempting entry? Bottom line: it was much simpler and more straightforward to enter the United States than to re-enter Jamaica. If someone holds a valid Jamaican passport, why should they have to go through all this to exercise a right to which they are entitled?

BUS FARES AND INFLATION

Speaking of productivity, the mix-up over the significance of lower JUTC fares to inflation is what we used to call a “serious joke” or a “lamps”. Any observant Kingstonian could tell Richard and Nigel that only a very small proportion of travellers use JUTC and so the effect of a pitifully small price reduction would have little or no impact on overall prices.

The ticket concession was and has now been found out to be a pathetic political ploy, a “lamps” at everyone’s cost, timed to last until the next general election. But apparently bright people are so divorced from common people’s lives that big predictions were based not on “solid rock”, but on “sinking sand”. What is in the mind of these high officials that they unashamedly “tek wi fi Eediat”?

MORE UNEQUAL

The widening levels of inequality in this nation are evidencing themselves in hugely divergent versions of reality. It was painfully so in our past. But wasn’t the whole idea of the independence project to reduce rather than deepen the cleavage? The reverse is happening. Isn’t it appalling that the Prime Minister has to acknowledge on the campaign trail that he now appreciates that local government does not work as it should? Most of us could have told him that – and much more.

PRIORITIES

Government justifies covering the probably $14 billion annual loss at JUTC as an appropriate “social expenditure”. It is not. Under the present system, that level of subsidy is a self-inflicted haemorrhage which taxpayers are forced to undergo. It also reflects hopelessly skewed priorities. Make a comparison with school feeding. Some $9 billion is allocated in the upcoming budget. This is an improvement for which hungry children and poverty-stricken parents will be grateful.

But with easily half of our school population being food insecure, double that amount will be needed to ensure the best learning in school which includes the development of good nutritional habits. Which is the higher priority? Feeding children so they can learn or propping up a decrepit, unreformed, corrupt transport relic which at best is helpful to only a fraction of those who are forced to pay for it? Rural taxpayers should rebel!

LIVELY CONSCIENCES?

Jamaican consciences must continue to retch at the daily reports out of Gaza. The entire land is being intentionally and systematically turned into a human abattoir. The true intention of the colonisers is now explicit. Thousands of settlers are to be housed in Palestinian territory. Talk about a two-state solution which Jamaican foreign policy has supported in the past, has become meaningless. The President of the United States is heard to say that he finds expanding Israeli settlements to be “uncomfortable”. What a disappointment he is turning out to be on this issue – and others. Our government is no less so. The memory of the anti-colonialists of our history is being disrespected by hurry-come-up opportunists. The churches who exhort us to value life have failed once again to inspire the followers of Jesus to value life -Arab, Jew, it matters not- and to pressure local heathens and hootipecks to stand up for righteousness.

CRY FOR UKRAINE

And on a related and equally tragic front. It now appears that, so as to follow Trump pee-pee cluck-cluck, Republican legislators are seeing to it that Ukraine is defeated, NATO is diminished , Zelenskyy suffers the fate of Nevalny and America backslides into nativism and isolationism. The moon can become the 51st state and Mars is only a few trillion dollars away from conquest. All this while man’s inhumanity to man prevails. “Eediat business”!? Sadly yes.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.