Say A Prayer For St. John’s This Christmas | Editorial

By Kieron Murdoch | Opinion Contributor

Whatever your faith, whatever you believe, please take a moment to offer up a prayer for our capital city St. John’s this Christmas season. Perhaps divine intervention is the only thing that can alleviate the desperate and rundown state of affairs there.

Promises are fleeting. When something draws attention to the poor state of the city like someone dropping through plywood and into a drain, there’s plenty of talk from officialdom, but only for a while. Very soon after, we relapse into our resigned way of thinking that we are simply unable to do better.

The filth continues. The abandoned and dilapidated structures remain. The green slimy gutters remain. The stench remains. Market Street remains ungovernable. Vagrancy remains. The absence of parking persists. The lawless vending continues. It’s a place many residents do their hardest to avoid.

The number of city roads in dire need of simple routine patches and repair work grows, but it can’t get done. Why? It feels as though you are driving over a battlefield at times, in and out of craters left behind by mortars and grenades. Do we not all drive on the same roads? Are those responsible for works unaware of the state of affairs?

When they do work, the work is shoddy. We are beginning to question whether a single road engineer, civil engineer or any other form of engineer works for the Department of Public Works on a full-time or consulting basis. Workmen routinely just drop concrete, asphalt and other aggregates with a bit of plywood to shape it up, and call it George, never mind how slapdash it looks and how quickly it degrades.

What about sanitation? The place is filthy and always filthy. The streets and gutters need to be washed. And after that, they need to be baptized. Garbage piles up in bags next to rubbish bins. The gutters smell like the ocean farted and then died and then farted again and then died again. It is deplorable.

And then there’s the issue of development and control. What new vendors’ malls or zoned areas have been developed in St. John’s recently? Clearly, you must make provision for all levels of trading, or else things will become haphazard and chaotic. And you can’t do it overnight. You need to work with private developers and land owners and plan. People are selling food over the open gutter.

The congestion has reached ridiculous levels. It has become counterproductive to try and get any business done in the city. You drive around aimlessly to full parking lots or to lots so far away that you have a journey to get where you need to go. Is there a 5-year plan for the development of a minimum number of parking areas at planned intervals across different streets?

Could incentives not be offered to private landowners to cooperate on such a strategy over time? Especially those who only have dilapidated unused structures on their property for aeons? Are we oversimplifying things here? Because it seems to us like there are small things that could be done with a certain level of interest and planning and execution but no one seems to actually care.

And what about the actual overall governance of St. John’s? You have the St. John’s Development Corporation (SJDC) but they don’t seem to really be in charge of the city. You have Saiid Greene who was appointed to the post of “Director Of City &Urban Renewal” in the Tourism Ministry. Has anything been renewed?? CBH has its duties in St. John’s and Solid Waste probably does as well.

But all of these need to be better coordinated. St. John’s needs a centralized local authority responsible for coherently addressing all issues, not a piecemeal patchwork of agencies and officials who don’t communicate with each other and shift responsibility around to the point that too little nothing gets done.

And could someone please explain what has become of Fort Road? It is an abomination and has been that way a long time now. We know we are outside of city bounds on this one but we have to ask: What is going on? We can’t tell if work is being done or is not being done. Sometimes you see activity, sometimes nothing.

And then the bus stations. How has it not occurred to anyone that the two bus stations are totally inadequate and have become dens of filth and iniquity? Why should the population be reduced to such circumstances? Do we not want better for ourselves? Do we not want more than this hot stinking, festering, aggressive, disorderly, unruly, dilapidated mess? Grass growing on every street where it was never intended to grow. Drains covered with plywood. A hot stench all the time. The public market is an unspeakable mess.

The soul of the city itself needs to be rescued from the damnation that it is heading toward. The city needs to be baptized and born again.

About the writer:

Kieron Murdoch is an opinion contributor at antigua.news. He worked as a journalist and later as a radio presenter in Antigua and Barbuda for eight years, covering politics and governance especially. If you have an opinion on the issues raised in this editorial and you would like to submit a response by email to be considered for publication, please email [email protected].