Jamaica’s samfie men — and women — are playing a modernization game while the country needs to be deepening what independence means. Modernization and the fiction that deliverance means more than a lowest rung job are not the same.
Would-be visitors are disserved; especially those that according to the Visit Jamaica website should meet Jamaicans in their villages, while also telling American travel advisors that clients should stay within resort areas for safety. See The Climate Traveler of March 7.
The samfie is a fraudster, a con artist, the “politician man” who frustrates hopes. Jamaicans revere truth-telling through their music, from the plaintive mento of the vendor who can’t find a buyer for her ackees at Linstead Market, to the charismatic preaching of Bob Marley, to the dancehall hit by Kabaka Pyramid.
“Well done, well done Mr. politician man. You done a wonderful job a tear down we country Demolition man.”
A muddle
Nowhere in the Caribbean do elected regimes scandalize their own people as in Jamaica. Its dependence on overtourism has only worsened “working poverty.” People want deliverance from the sham development offered by whichever political party seesaws into office. Obfuscations disserve even the political party meant to benefit.
PM Andrew Holness of the Jamaica Labor Party samfies for the American travel trade press: “We’re building Jamaica 2.0. You’re literally seeing a country transform before your eyes. We’re trying to make sure that we get it right so that we can transition to developed country status. Tourism will play a key role in this,” Holness and Sandals Resort mogul Adam Stewart told editor-in-chief of Travel Weekly Arnie Weissmann on an overseas call in February this year.
Holness got the exposure he wanted but without a ringing endorsement for his policies that were no secret even if politely left unchallenged. Recent data from the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) shows that post-Covid poverty dropped to 16.7 per cent in 2021 and to 12.6 percent in 2022. Nevertheless, the World Bank points out, “the quality of employment remains a concern given high informality and fewer average hours worked relative to pre-pandemic levels.” even as post-Covid recovery was sending people traveling again. Poverty avoidance, like truth-telling, is makeshift.
Yet, “to make sure we get it right” justifies new mega-resorts never before seen in Jamaica (or anywhere in the region) that ensure that the mass of low-wage hotel workers will join domestic workers, poor clerks,
uneducated custodians in the manufacturing sector, and teachers who fall further behind in Jamaica’s economy no matter how hard they seem to work — backing up even a job for which they may not be qualified for a few hours a week by making deliveries or providing handyman services (see below).
The same is true of deals cut for a new generation of north coast mega-resorts that are walling off the 65 miles between MoBay and east beyond Ocho Rios, while decimating ecosystems, local fishing, and placing long favored beaches historically left for Jamaicans because they hadn’t yet been made the province of sweetheart deals that overseas hotel groups couldn’t resist.
Alienating Jamaicans from Jamaica: from the International Monetary Fund to China
According to the IMF, Jamaica a decade ago had become one of the most indebted nations in the world. Unwilling to lay off more public workers or further weaken its domestic social safety net, as the IMF until recently customarily demanded for extending existing loans, Jamaica instead entered into a new kind of debt trap. Political parties swallowed the bait-and-switch hook of the People’s Republic of China’s Belt and Road scheme and its even more sovereignty compromising lures of overseas hotel chains to modernize its economy.
This time Jamaica didn’t promise to pay back loans. Successive governments (GOJ) engaged in redfaced samfie in the alienation of sovereign lands.
To modernize the Port of Kingston, the Holness government divested ownership to an agency of the People’s Republic (PRC). To build a network of toll roads to move goods, elite travelers and ostensibly tourists, they are repatriating all tolls to China until costs are fully paid back. For modernizing the bauxite and alumina industry, China gained ownership of
extraction lands in Hanover Parish in return for a new juvenile hospital in Hanover and convention center in Montego Bay, the Hanover Parish seat.
Upfront payback includes management by PRC nationals as well as unrevealed numbers of laborers. Details have been kept secret, writes Brian Matthew Sperlongano in a 2023 MA thesis for the U.S. Naval War College on the economy of Jamaica.
Last year at a program for coffee growers, Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett declared, “Of all the partners that tourism has across the world… of all the key players that enable travel and tourism to happen, farmers and agriculturalists are at the heart of it and are the most important… because 80 per cent of the reason that people travel is to consume food,” Bartlett said with less meaning than intended. Equally true, people remain at home to consume food.
But to consume local food? Does this work for the chains and their newly concessioned mega-resorts that want similar grades of everything they buy?
Nor does holding a job equate with knowing how to do it. Jobs are about “who do you know?”
In the hit Jamaican movie Smile Orange, the lifeguards at a small
Jamaican run hotel don’t know how to swim and flee while a guest drowns in the pool. When I send a pair of suit pants in for cleaning at a globally chained hotel, they’re returned child-sized like a head shrunken by obeah.
A tale of countries
PM Holness probably persuaded some travel advisors after they read his Travel Weekly plea to keep their clients coming to Jamaica. But the compelling endorsement he came away without instead went to Jordan in the Middle East, a conservative kingdom overlapped at its western flank by a war zone. At least Jordan hadn’t shot itself in the foot and at Petra and elsewhere preserved its antiquities. At Aqaba on the Red Sea, Jordan’s only 16 miles of shoreline, tourism is more conventional but without hotels blocking the sea view.
It wasn’t King Abdullah II’s plea. The TW exposure was arranged by the Jordan Tourism Board with Tourism Cares and the Adventure Travel Trade Association (ATTA). A small group visited in February. When they returned, Arnie Weissmann moderated a webinar to discuss what the group experienced.
His endorsement was full throated.
“For those who are not traveling to express support for one side or the other in the Gaza war — and who may, in fact, be looking for the benefits of travel in the most traditional sense — this may be an excellent time to visit Jordan.”
Shannon Stowell, the CEO of the ATTA, said that the Ruins at Petra, Jordan’s best-known attraction, wasn’t empty, but was almost empty,” he observed. “You should go now. Now is the time.”
Said ATTA board member Kimberly Daley, she “felt safer in Jordan than she does at home in Los Angeles.”
(To be continued.)
