EDITORIAL - How Mr Hill can avoid the KSAC's contagion of sloth

Robert Hill, the new town clerk at the Kingston and St Andrew Corporation (KSAC), can't claim to his credit - for which he should be grateful - the licensing of Kingston's handcarts.

That signal achievement belongs to his predecessor, Errol Greene, and his boss, the chairman of the KSAC and Kingston's mayor, Her Worship Angela Brown Burke.

So, Mr Hill will have to chart new courses, which we expect he can. He seems a bright young man of good promise with a genuine wish to do good.

That at the KSAC won't be easy. For Robert Hill faces grave dangers, not least of which is being sucked into the KSAC's vortex of intellectual and creative narcolepsy. The place is lazy.

In that regard, we have a bit of advice for Mr Hill. First, he should invest in a good pair of earplugs, to be inserted at monthly council meetings when the droning begins. He might even consider wearing them during certain kinds of meetings with his boss, Mrs Brown Burke. He should also find the old episodes of the British television sitcom, Yes, Minister, learn, and in so far as possible, apply the strategies of the permanent secretary in the show.

But more important, Mr Hill, if he is serious about "work(ing) hard in ensuring the interests of the people" of Kingston and St Andrew, must develop a vision for the Corporate Area if he did not come to the job with one.

Preferably, he should have had a clear idea of what he wants to achieve before he starts, and thought about how he intends to steer Mrs Brown Burke and the council in the direction they want to go.

In the event, he must keep at the forefront the fact that with more than 662,000 persons living within its boundaries, the KSAC, the local government, presides not only over Jamaica's capital, but a quarter of the country's population and a substantial part of the economy.

The KSAC has within its boundaries, too, large swathes of squalor, public disorder and a local government that is absent of ideas or priorities about how to go about a fix. Maybe it is not an absence of ideas, but rather a large vision for Kingston and the wider KSAC. Put another way, as the chief technical man, Mr Hill will also have to do a fair bit of thinking on behalf of the KSAC and its councillors.

Further, given the nature of the place and how contagious its indolence seems to be, Mr Hill may be advised to have a medical check-up, enrol in a gym, work on some mental exercises and, perhaps, keep in drawers a stash of energy drinks. He might even consider putting a stock on the KSAC's budget, to be drunk by the councillors ahead of meetings.

Replacing pit latrines

An important initiative by the education ministry should not go unnoticed.

in 58 primary and all-age schools pit latrines were closed and replaced with modern toilets. More than a 100 other schools still have pit latrines, for whose replacement the ministry is working with Food for the Poor. Sixty of these should be completed during the next fiscal year.

While we appreciate the shortage of resources, we feel that all stops must be pulled to accelerate the project.

The shift, we expect, will contribute to enhancing the learning environment of these schools and self-esteem of their students.

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