I Refused To Be Used To Place Lipstick On A Pig .

A guy I went to High School with tagged me in a social media post yes­ter­day (was­n’t sure why). The post fol­lowed a pic­ture he post­ed of the run-down, dilap­i­dat­ed Post Office build­ing in Guys Hill Saint Catherine where we went to High School.
Guys Hill is tucked away in the cool Hills of Saint Catherine on the bor­ders of Saint Ann and St Mary. Guys Hill – is named after Richard Guy, who it is thought served with Generals Penn and Venables in the con­quest of Jamaica in 1655, and who was grant­ed land there.

I’m not sure what year the Guys Hill post office was built, what I do know is that many of those facil­i­ties were built dur­ing the colo­nial peri­od before Jamaica became an inde­pen­dent nation[sic]. Which sug­gest to me that despite all we know about the Colonial pow­er and it’s many neg­a­tives they built things.
Anyway there were quite a few com­ments about paint­ing the post office. Several well-inten­tioned posters offered up ideas of small dona­tions to paint the place.
I com­ment­ed that the con­di­tion of the facil­i­ty offers every­one an oppor­tu­ni­ty to decide whether our coun­try was pro­gress­ing or regress­ing. After all pre­cious lit­tle has been done to improve these facil­i­ties for the next gen­er­a­tion after they were hand­ed to us by the British.
Upon which the shit hit the fan.

I nev­er real­ized that the rea­son I was tagged was because the orig­i­nal poster believed I could help to bring atten­tion to the sit­u­a­tion, or more like­ly offer up some funds, for what that’s worth. I found out soon enough that nei­ther the orig­i­nal poster nor some of the blog­gers were con­sci­en­tious Jamaicans who want­ed to see sit­u­a­tions improve, but that the group was large­ly a bunch of hyper par­ti­san PNP hack-tivist. [sic]

I was imme­di­ate­ly accused of being neg­a­tive and cam­paign­ing for the oth­er party .
The oth­er party?
I did not even real­ize this was a par­ty polit­i­cal issue, I’m so naïve’ . I was dumb-struck I would have been one of the very first to con­tribute in a small way toward improv­ing the appear­ance of the facil­i­ty. When I com­ment­ed that the cit­i­zens have a right to expect some degree of ser­vice for the tax­es they pay I did not know I could be accused of being against the project.

I fun­da­men­tal­ly believed that all Jamaicans would be as offend­ed as I was that since Independence the black lead­er­ship of our coun­try has sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly failed.
Don’t get me wrong it is high­ly com­mend­able that any cit­i­zen or group of cit­i­zens would want to take it onto them­selves to do what Government failed to do.
What is not kosher is to attack peo­ple who are deter­mined to hold gov­ern­ments respon­si­ble for their failures.

What was con­firmed to we yes­ter­day is what I have always know, Jamaicans are quite will­ing to cut their polit­i­cal par­ty slack regard­less of their failures.
Obviously the polit­i­cal admin­is­tra­tions under­stand this and are hap­py to con­tin­ue the sta­tus quo know­ing the peo­ple are unwill­ing to hold them accountable.

This is the image of the facil­i­ty I used as lit­tle boy in grade school , over forty years lat­er it remains the same. Sure I could ral­ly some friends to paint this thing but would a coat of paint change the cir­cum­stances of the fail­ures inher­ent here laud­able though it would be?
No , so I did not do that, what I per­son­al­ly did was to attack the more sub­stan­tive issues of pro­vid­ing the school it’s very first com­put­er for which they were very grate­ful, even as I con­tin­ue my efforts to help in big­ger ways.

In the mean­time how­ev­er it does not pre­vent me from agi­tat­ing, mil­i­tat­ing, com­plain­ing, urg­ing, and cussing for greater account­abil­i­ty in the Island’s gov­ern­ment and greater bang for the buck of the people.
It is what I did as a teenage school­boy, being a pest and a thorn to the Parish Councillor and the now deceased mem­ber of par­lia­ment E K Powell until they grew tired of me. Those efforts result­ed in the pave­ment of the Bonnett road­ways for the first time in the District’s history .
Additionally Bonnett received elec­tric­i­ty under the rur­al elec­tri­fi­ca­tion pro­gram for the very first time putting our dis­trict on par with Guys Hill and oth­er well known com­mu­ni­ties . Previously no one knew where Bonnett was.

Those efforts though not sole­ly my own, caused rep­re­sen­ta­tives of one par­ty to approach me years lat­er to rep­re­sent that par­ty in rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al pol­i­tics at the local Government lev­el . I polite­ly declined, I was not about to be a part of a club I hat­ed and abhorred.
I was nev­er one to cut peo­ple slack when they have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to per­form and fail to do so.
Placing a coat of paint on crum­bling infra­struc­ture is com­mend­able it shows that the cit­i­zens want things to have a bet­ter appearance.
A bet­ter appear­ance how­ev­er does not negate the crum­bling infra­struc­ture under­neath. It is symp­to­matic of the wider Jamaican soci­ety’s fail­ure to hold the Governing PNP account­able for it’s failures.

As I have writ­ten repeat­ed­ly the PNP is like cot­ton can­dy, to the peo­ple, sweet to the taste , leaves them want­i­ng more, cre­ates a thirst and is ulti­mate­ly bad for their health. A poten­tial coat of paint though com­mend­able does the eyes some good but the greater good is served when those empow­ered to act are held account­able for their actions or lack thereof.
We can ill-afford to cause polit­i­cal affil­i­a­tions to blind us to the immense harm which this Government has done to our country.
No amount of paint by a polit­i­cal hack and his friends will cov­er up this fail­ure because elec­tions are imminent.
In that regard I refused to be used in the process of plac­ing lip­stick on a pig .