Jamaica is no doubt one of the greatest places on earth to live or visit but as usual no statement can be made about this country which cannot be qualified at the other end of the spectrum. So despite the music, the track, the good Hope Cattle and Marcus Mosiah, any real examination of our successes as a nation has to be juxtaposed against some of the ‘EPIC FAILURES’. So follow along as we count down Jamaica’s 10 most epic failures.

10. The Motor Vehicle Ticketing System
Points are allocated to your license based on traffic offenses which add up to a suspended license if you use up all your points. Incidentally you can also lose points for having a mechanical defect on your car. This seems like a good idea, but without a central database to manage all of this information, nobody, including the police officers issuing the tickets, seems to know how many points are against a particular individual. As such this is now the big stick corrupt Jamaican police officers use to try to get motorists to buy their way out of a ticket.

9. Flat Bridge
Deathtrap. Even though a number of people have lost their lives at this bridge site, to this date all we have built is a single-lane bridge with no guardrails. The terrain is rough I agree but that is what architects do – solve difficult problems with unique ideas. It seems like bridge building just is not our thing; it took us years to create an effective solution to the Yallahs Fording in St. Thomas as well.

8. Political System
See this post The Fissures in the Jamaican Political System

7. Free Health Care
Jamaica had problems offering quality health care to its citizens at a cost. So it is no surprise that the free health care being offered is pretty much a bad joke. One story making the rounds is that a patient from KPH was discharged, given a bag of blood in an igloo and told to get herself to UHWI for emergency dialysis.

6. Protection of Children (or Lack thereof)
Yes I know we have recently launched the Child Protection Act, which aims to prosecute adults who fail to report child abuse. I am curious though why this said protection does not seem to extend to children under government protection or the multitudes of children begging, hustling and cleaning windows at every other stoplight it seems these days. Who is responsible? Why is there no initiative to protect and provide for these children? Hmmmm I guess lip service only takes you so far.

5. GSAT
Common Entrance was not perfect, in fact it was far from it, but at least it set some sort of standard. So what do we do, replace it with a system where everybody “passes”? Come on who made the decision that any exam that a kid who cannot even read can “pass” is a joke? A horrible, twisted, sick dirty joke! Get real, the education system needs to be completely revamped and not this half ass trick being played on kids who are being sent to “high schools” I would send a dog to? Let’s get real, and get some standards.

4. Property Tax Collection
Also known as failure to collect taxes. While I can understand the issues involved in collecting taxes from self employed individuals and hustlers using an antiquated system that is a quagmire of moth balls and old paper, the fact that property tax compliance is a little over fifty (50) percent is kind of retarded, especially when this is viewed against the backdrop of a cash strapped government. It is not like property owners can hide the property. GET SOME BALLS! Collect the property taxes and lower the income tax.

3. National Debt
Trillions of dollars, and what makes this one particular galling is that we do not have shit to show for all this money that is owed. Ghettonomics at its best…borrow money to buy food, rims that spin backwards and live above your means, all bad when done by an individual…disgraceful for a country.

2. Murder Rate
Over 500 victims in a little over 100 days, we have managed reduced the value of human life to nothing…

1. Water
Rain on your roof, pipes bone dry, water bill at the end of the month. A bad joke in a bad comedy…actually I can do better…”Jamaica land of wood and what?”. Some might argue that placing the inability to provide citizens with water in their pipes as trivial when compared to say the murder rate above, but I beg to differ. The fact that as a nation we do not even have the vision and the ability to harness one of our most abundant resources is the perfect metaphor to sum up all the failures noted above. In 4,000 B.C. the Egyptians were able to build a flourishing empire in the middle of the desert. Fast forward to 2010 with all the technology and know how garnered over the last couple thousand years we cannot engineer adequate water supplies to on an island that is 1,114 square miles…EPIC FAIL.