Mark Wignall | KSAMC has always embraced turmoil

My friend was Jamaican, black-skinned and extremely proud of his skin colour. “Brother Mark, let us stop the rubbish. In Jamaica, brown skin and white Jamaicans will always be ahead of the rest of us, because they control the insiders.”

To his way of thinking, black-skinned people who wanted to really get ahead had to be prepared to break the rules while paying a substantial sum of money under the table. At the time I met and knew him, and really got to like him, he told me about his diabetes, his love for his wife and the same, intense love for her children, who were not his DNA-wise.

Four developments that he had pending through what was then the KSAC, were on the stalling table. One day, he surreptitiously arranged to have me listen in to a conversation between himself and someone from the KSAC who was in charge of approving developments.

At the time, he was under pressure from the KSAC, which wanted to shatter his development; to flatten it, to render it as pure rubble.

The conversation I heard was quite plain. He had paid a man from the KSAC to approve a building plan after it had been refused by a main committee inside the KSAC. I knew the man who was in the middle of the kerfuffle. He was a decent man and he was at his wit’s end. How could he have been so stupid?

To cut a long story short, they are now both dead. The buildings were eventually brought flat to the ground.

In light of the the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation (KSAMC) finding itself deep inside the Integrity Commission forcing real decency towards it, we are being made to believe that a burst of conscience will suddenly reveal itself to the present mayor, and his words will come to us in tablets of divine stone guaranteed to lead us to commandments of political leadership.

HERE IS THE INSIDE JOB

I knew him from the streets. Like many Jamaican businessmen, his first big money came from the streets. Because he was smart, he spun that money around to construct insurance companies, banks, hotels, construction outfits and, from that, he made millions into billions.

One from that entrepreneurial class has recently applied to what was then the KSAC on a development of 30 units in a middle class residential area. He knew that he was going to be given a hard time. “Mark, here whey a want you help mi wid. Mek mi put you name pon di application, but wi can do it so it don’t jump out at dem.”

According to him, after completing seven developments and having had to pay under the table many millions of dollars, he did not want me to only have his word on the corruption, he wanted me to experience it. “Mark, every development, mi haffi pay.”

I must confess, I chickened out. I could not see how it was possible for me to enter that lion’s den and escape unscathed.

As much as I want to believe in the Kingston mayor, he ought to know that many of us came before him and, thus, we eat his words and we swallow them sweeter than dessert.

The auditor general has taken the KSAMC to task, “As we work to strengthen our building approval process, in keeping with the recommendations made by the Integrity Commission, we will be naming a three-member panel to conduct an administrative review of the process. This panel will consist of individuals who have worked in the built environment and who have the skills, knowledge, and experience required to provide proper oversight of the building and planning department,” said the mayor.

Mayor Swaby, $33 million has been spent on houses for the poor but the money has seemingly evaporated into the inability to track its disappearance.

OUGHT NOT TO HAPPEN

Many things happen in this country when they ought not to happen.

I met the man many years ago. He came to me, not me to him. In those circumstances, I was always expecting trickery, some political skullduggery.

According to him, based on something I had written about police and guns, he wanted to take me inside the armoury at Elletson Road to show me the state of guns and how badly they were damaged. A cap and sunglasses were quite foolish for me but he suggested that clown-like rubbish outfit.

We went there the day and, as I entered that early afternoon, I was quite nervous. But, in five minutes, I was in. I sat on a stool as he spoke casually to someone who he knew. I looked around, nodded my head and smiled as they spoke. I saw the guns in the repair section as smiths worked, and I tried from my one stool to disappear into the woodwork. Were those the guns that cops were using? Obviously not properly usable.

Things in those matters have radically changed. That makes me extremely overjoyed.

I have made mention of that in this column because Mayor Swaby must know that, in Jamaica, hardly anything can be hidden.

Many Jamaican businessmen believe that a big development can only be completed if sufficient graft at the government level is organised. Indeed, at verandah talk among the super rich in this country, many frown upon those who cross the t’s and dot the i’s. In fact, they are mostly laughed out of the gathering.

My friend who loved his black skin and his ability to exist among who he described as the ‘brown class’ at the top of Jamaican society would always say to me, “Brother Mark, dem not gwine make di rules fi me.”

In the end, they got to him by tweaking the directions inside what was then the KSAC. All of his buildings were eventually flattened. And the ruling class continued to rule. And it mattered little how many rules they broke at the KSAMC.

Mark Wignall is a political and public affairs analyst. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and mawigsr@gmail.com