Editorial | Papine: Failure of imagination

Readers of Carolyn Cooper’s weekly column in The Sunday Gleaner know that the squalor of Papine Market in Eastern St Andrew is a peeve about which she wrote often, until she perhaps grew tired of the authorities’ failure to heed her complaints. Or ours. She stopped shopping there as frequently as she used to.

Ms Cooper returned on Saturday. The market’s garbage collection area and its immediate vicinity remain a dump.

The official garbage receptacle, a concrete enclosure at the back of the market, was, on her visit on Saturday, worse than Ms Cooper remembered it.

“The mountain of garbage had overflowed onto the sidewalk,” Ms Cooper wrote. “And the smell! It really can’t be healthy to buy food near that dump.”

We agree. But it is not only the market dump that is squalid. It is the entirety of Papine. At least its public spaces.

The greater shame is that no one – including city managers, political representatives, the great institutions that exist in the area, or adjacent thereto – seem to be shamed by its grubbiness. They are oblivious to it. If they notice, they conjure excuses, including blaming citizens for the inadequacy of the services the State is obligated to provide and for which taxpayers pay.

So Akeen Morris, the director of market operations at the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation (KSAMC), within whose jurisdiction Papine falls, said that the day of Ms Cooper’s visit was the day before the market’s garbage was normally collected. Moreover, people had made Papine Market “a central dumping ground”.

INCAPABLE OF FASHIONING A SOLUTION

Apparently, the city’s local government is incapable of fashioning a solution, short of spending large amounts of money, to this problem. Like the ones Ms Cooper offered: establishing another dump elsewhere in Papine and collecting the market’s garbage more frequently. The cost of these cannot be greater than the public health risk.

Criticism of Mr Morris, a civil servant who executes policy, is perhaps unfair. In all likelihood, Papine’s seediness preceded his tenure and reflects more the failures and lack of vision of those who threw their hats in the political ring, offering to do good for citizens.

In that regard, Fayval Williams, the member of parliament (MP), since 2016, for Eastern St Andrew, and Venesha Phillips, the long-standing local government councillor for the Papine Division in that constituency, have much to answer for. So, too, does Andre Hylton, Ms Williams’ predecessor, who hopes to regain the seat at the next general election.

Ms Williams, in more than seven years as MP, does not appear to have paid much attention to Papine. Her public statements about the market and the town square, a critical commercial district and transportation hub, have been few. And Ms Phillips’ track record, going back a decade, is uninspiring.

In November 2013, Ms Phillips – who entered the KSAMC as a councillor for the People’s National Party (PNP), from which she was estranged for several years before recently formally joining the Jamaica Labour Party – bristled at complaints of Papine’s seediness. She claimed vindication in the fact that there had been some kerb painting, minor repairs of public infrastructure, and that months earlier she had got television cameras to record the removal of loads of garbage from the market.

At the time, her then PNP colleague, Mr Hylton (their party then controlled the national government as well as the KSAMC) contorted and slithered around the solutions to Papine’s squalor.

In a letter to The Gleaner, he said: “... Solid waste disposal, especially commercial waste disposal, poses significant resource demand on the public purse. In this regard, there is no easy fix, or single solution, that can permanently resolve the garbage problem.”

Recently, Mr Hylton has been advocating creative solutions to all manner of community problems in the constituency. Garbage collection at the Papine Market and the general dereliction of the square will no doubt soon catch his attention.

BIGGER SHORTCOMING

Papine’s circumstance, however, represents an even bigger shortcoming – a failure of imagination that borders on malfeasance. This starts with not grasping the potential of Papine’s situational geography.

At the heart of Papine Square, almost, is the main campus of the University of Technology (UTech), a polytechnic institution; across the way, to the south, is the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI), the teaching hospital of The University of the West Indies (UWI). UHWI is on the UWI’s sprawling Mona campus, with its several faculties. Up the road, a few minutes’ walk from the market and square, is a vocational training school of the HEART/NSTA Trust; less than a mile to the west is Jamaica College (JC), a leading high school. Thousands of students, teachers and university faculty traverse Papine daily.

This newspaper and others have promoted the development of Papine into a genuine university town, with the involvement of all critical stakeholders. There has been lip service to the idea, but not concrete action.

It cannot be beyond the capacity of the potential partners to kick-start the process by just getting the place clean – and keeping it that way.