THIS COUNTRY is in a bad way, a very bad way, and nobody seems to care.
There’s a lethargy, a callous dereliction of duty and a malaise in this society that is crippling the advancement of this nation. We’ve already been told of the billions in foreign investment on which we’ve lost out because of the molasses pace at which public business is conducted.
Imagine, the enormous revenue that would have accrued to the economy, and the employment that would have been generated, had we been able to capture that investment.
So, after a year (or is it two?) of torturing the students of Blackman And Gollop Primary and causing the closure of the school on more than one occasion, the cow itch problem posed by a nearby plot of land has been addressed.
It took them all of 12 months and some to deal with what was always a simple environmental problem.
Here we had an environmental problem affecting children at a nearby school to the extent that it was causing them to lose school time. Should this be a priority for the Ministry of Education and the Environmental Division of the Ministry of Health, in collaboration with the relevant departments of Government? Of course it should – the moment it raised its head.
The Ministry of Education
LETTERS
TO THE EDITOR
alerts the Environmental Department about the problem and its urgency, and the department immediately deploys its resources to fix the problem. If the owner of the land cannot be found, you clean it anyway and deal with the legalities afterwards.
And I suspect that elsewhere in the world, the appropriate agencies would have been pressed into action to arrest the problem once and for all. Sounds simple enough? Not in Barbados.
All the way back in March last year the Press was reporting the then Minister of Education Ronald Jones as saying he was unhappy with the manner in which the problem was being handled. “At the same time,” said the report, “Jones has sought to absolve his ministry of any blame for the problem, which today forced the closure of the Staple Grove, Christ Church school for the second time in as many weeks.”
Well, Mr Jones, perhaps . . . you and members of your Government should have been able to put some pressure on those responsible for solving the problem.
So a problem that could have been resolved within a couple weeks is permitted to drag on, much to the inconvenience of the children of the school, while public servants sat and twiddled their thumbs.
Imagine ministers of Government had to leave their offices to look at cow itch in a field, so that those being paid to manage our education system and take care of our environment would do their job.
Barbados in 2019. We in deep . . . . – OLUTOYE WALROND
A COW ITCH VINE that was on the outskirts of the Blackman And Gollop Primary School before it was cleared earlier
DAILY
this month. (FP)
