#BTEditorial – Garbage in. Garbage out.

The expression of bewilderment attributed to former Prime Minister Sir Lloyd Erskine Sandiford to describe the sorry state of the Affairs of State in this island realm prior to May 24,  2018, seems to have become a rather apt expression on the state of a great many things gone wrong.

“How did we get here?”

It is a particularly poignant quip when applied to the state of sanitation, one of the Government’s most sacred public services.

There is no doubt that part of the Achilles anatomy of the last administration was the sore point of raw sewage seeping onto the streets, backyards and carparks of the Hastings and Worthing areas – powered by fiscal ineptitude.

The stench seemed symbolic of a shambolic regime seemingly incapable of finding and applying any workable solution to a problem that had been allowed to fester.

How did we get here? A perfect storm of weak management, lax maintenance, poor planning, even worse execution and muted public awareness and communication created the liquid ‘stinkeroo’.

This apparently took only a general election, it would appear, to resolve.

So what’s our excuse now for the rampant, unabated pile-up of garbage across the nation, particularly given the fact that the taxpayers now directly pay for its cleanup through a special levy?

The consensus has been that we appear to have a far more efficient and effective administration governing our affairs.

We have passed the self-imposed targets of an austerity programme named BERT to the warm applause of the International Monetary Fund. Government has slashed transfers to statutory corporations, including the Sanitation Services Authority.

We have negotiated our domestic debt profile, persuaded creditors to take a hefty haircut and continued to talk to the external holders of government paper. Our foreign exchange reserves have shot up to record levels.

And we have raised taxes or introduced more efficient ones. We have been told, for example, that the Garbage and Sewage Contribution, which in some cases has triggered a doubling of water bills of many customers, was needed to finance the purchase of additional SSA trucks at the very least. We presumed that a shortage of vehicles was at the heart of the previous administration’s own little local difficulties in waste management.

But even with six of the seven second-hand trucks currently operating – the seventh developed trouble – waste collection has dwindled from twice weekly to once or twice a month.

This is utterly unacceptable. In the recent heatwave, the proliferation of flies chasing decaying matter offended even the hardiest sensibilities. The bushiest byways now reek of the foul odours of illegally and hastily disposed waste.

Surely this is not the ‘Vision 2020’ the Prime Minister had in mind for Barbadians who are to be reunited with their long-lost homeland, far less the expectation of a nation depending on a winter tourist season in two months’ time.

But for us who live on this rock here and now, our health and sanitation are a thing not to be trifled with.

What is more, the failure of the minister responsible for the SSA, the Minister of Environment and National Beautification to contemplate even a short-term solution to the problem is nothing short of spectacular.

This, instead, was what Minister Trever Prescod chose to say to the nation about an apparent breakdown in waste management.

He said last week: “I am not the Lord Jesus Christ, I am Trevor Prescod, the minister. It is a responsibility I have been given and I have been given the responsibility short of the tools, whatever the cause. That is a matter that can be discussed and I consider that debate worthy of discussion.

“But to tell me I ought to have all the trucks here by now you are asking me to play Jesus Christ and I am not him,” he said, as he told a woeful tale of breaking-down trucks sent to rural locations – by a Minister of the Crown no less.

He declared: “I called the general manager and I asked him to send a truck to St Joseph. The first truck went down and it never got to its location. It broke down on the street.

“The second truck went down it broke down on the street it took three half of trucks to go down to St Joseph to bring waste from out of St Joseph.”

This rhetoric might play well at a constituency branch meeting of the party faithful in the dew of a Sunday night. We suggest that this is not what the People voted for.

The Government should contemplate decentralising the waste management issue and take a municipal approach – working with each parish to identify illegal dumping hotspots, employ jobless people in collecting, sorting, disposal and recycling of waste and move to a national policy to transform the way we treat our trash.

Whether water, sanitation or transport, these fundamental provisions of public services in any government cannot be managed by whimsy or wishes. It requires sober reflection and concerted effort.

For garbage in, garbage out.