Trees and Progress

Image from http://sainthelenaisland.info/dofe.htm 

There are quite a few trees in Jamestown, improving the appearance of town. We don’t get pronounced seasons, as do places further from the Equator, so there isn’t really an Autumn (“Fall”) when the trees shed all their leaves in preparation for Winter.  Trees lose leaves as and when they need replacing, throughout the year, so they are dropping leaves continually at all times.

Fallen leaves are fine in a forest – they fertilise the ground – but in town they are a nuisance, building up into piles of rotting foliage and blocking pathways, roads and drains.  So the job of leaf-sweeper here is not a seasonal one – it must be done throughout the year at intervals of just a few weeks.

“In the before days” (that’s the Saint way of saying “in the past”), a couple of chaps would turn up with brooms.  They would merrily chat with each other and with passers-by, and sometimes even sang as they worked, accompanied by the gently swish of stiff broom on concrete.  It took a couple of hours to do an area and was not an intrusive process.  But now it has been modernised.

Today a single chap does the job, equipped with a “leaf blower”.  In case you haven’t seen one, this is a petrol-powered engine driving a fan, and the idea is that you use the stream of air generated by the fan to blow the fallen leaves into a pile so that they are easier to shovel onto the cart for disposal.

There are, however, some issues with this.

Firstly a petrol-powered device is inherently more damaging to the environment than a couple of chaps with brooms, consuming scarce natural resources and generating various pollutants.

Secondly the process seems to take a great deal longer than the manual method – at least four and maybe up to six hours to clear a patch previously cleared in two.

Thirdly the machine makers a great deal of noise.  When the leaf-blower is operating in the Duke of Edinburg Playground it is actually necessary in my adjacent home to turn up the radio, television or whatever to hear it over the noise, which seems to run almost continuously for the whole morning, starting at 7am.

Lastly I feel sorry for the poor operator.  Because of the noise he (it’s always a he) is required to wear ear-defenders and because the direction the leaves may take is somewhat unpredictable he must wear a face-protecting visor too.  This makes interacting with anybody else impossible.  So instead of friendly companionship and maybe a cheery song he must operate isolated in a screened bubble, entirely alone.

Clearly, this is progress.  What puzzles me is who benefits from it?

DOCKIES

Because SURE can't figure out how to re-connect to the BBC World Service, we now get the BBC TV News - audio only - on the SAMS Radio 2 channel.

Apart from the fact that much of the time the programmes - designed, of course, for a visual medium - make no sense in sound-only mode, we also get the South African adverts, which introduced me to this new word.

I'm assuming that a "dockie" (I've only heard it said so I'm guessing at the spelling) is what normal sane and literate people call a "documentary". Apparently five syllables is too much for the millennium generation so it had to be abbreviated and "dockie" was the result.

Properly produced documentaries (by which I exclude almost all those produced by American television) require concentration and considered thought and it strikes me that anyone illiterate enough to refer to a documentary as a "dockie" is probably not capable of actually understanding one anyway, so the word is redundant.

Doing myself out of a job

Someone asked me via social media “If you were made Governor of St Helena, what would you do?”

Interesting question!

There is, of course, rather less likelihood of this happening than on my becoming the next President of the United States or the first human to land on Mars, but it is entertaining to consider the answer.

Except that it took me fewer than ten seconds to come up with my response:

“Abolish the role and replace it with a leader democratically elected by the people of St Helena.”

In general, the post of Governor dates back to the 17^th Century.  A colonial power invaded someone else’s land and set up a Governor to rule over the newly-subjugated people.  The latter had no say in the matter and if they tried to express a contrary view they were treated as rebels and executed by the military.  There was no self-determination, no democracy and no freedom of speech.

Taking a pertinent example, St Helena’s first Governor was John Dutton who was sent out in 1659 with a bunch of colonists and a small military contingent to “settle” the island.  There were no inhabitants to subdue, so the colonists – who presumably volunteered – seem to have happily accepted Dutton’s near-feudal rule over them.  But this did not last.  Only two Governors later, Richard Coney (March 1671 - August 1672) was “Seized by rebellious members of the island’s council and shipped back to England”[1].  Sadly this minor revolution did not establish a democracy and a new Governor arrived in the next ship from England.

In fact, St Helena did not get any form of democracy whatsoever until ---- can you guess?  The 1800s?  Wrong!  The 1920s?  Wrong!  The late 1940s in the social reforms after World War 2?  Wrong again.  St Helenians were not allowed to vote on anything at all until as late as 1963, and this was only to appoint members of an “Advisory Council”, which could express an opinion to the Governor but which he could choose to completely ignore.

It was not until the 2009 Constitution that the role of the Governor was pared back so that he was obliged both to listen to and act in accordance with the wishes of a democratically elected council, and even then there were so many caveats and special circumstances, some quite loosely worded, that the Governor can still, to this day, do more or less as s/he pleases.  He also controls the Police.

This is a complete nonsense in the 20^th year of the 21^st century.  It ranks the effectiveness of St Helenian democracy in line with how it is practiced in China and North Korea, and somewhat behind Iran.

Now we are going to get a new Constitution and our current Governor seems to think it is solely up to him to decide what’s in it.  He has himself picked (with no published criteria) a group of people to advise him, but there is no indication that the people of St Helena as a whole will be involved in the process and it is not even clear that the island will get to vote on whether the resulting Constitution is implemented.

A Constitution should be “an agreement between a people and their Government about how they want to be governed”, but apparently even in 2020 this does not apply to St Helena.

So, yes, in the once-in-a-sky-blue-pink-with-purple-dots-moon chance that I am made Governor of St Helena, I would almost immediately make myself redundant, to be replaced with a democratically elected leader, supported by a democratically elected council.

“Almost immediately”?

Well before I sacked myself I’d also bring in effective Freedom of Information legislation and a workable Data Protection Ordinance to secure the new democracy I was about to establish.

If anyone from the Foreign and Colonial (sorry, ‘Commonwealth’) Office wants to interview me for the post they can find my contact detail on this blog.  I won’t hold my breath ....

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[1] http://sainthelenaisland.info/governor.htm#gov003

Twelve becomes six, becomes one?

There should be a General Election here next year. I'm wondering - how many seats will we be voting for? Now that ExCo has granted itself power to ignore what the other seven councillors think (yesterday's Sentinel, p9 and also see Cyril Leo's letter p2) maybe we will be voting for ExCo members only with LegCo being disbanded? What now is the point of LegCo? The committee system that has been bypassed was slow and tedious, and certainly doing away with LegCo would speed up the process of getting decisions made and Ordinances passed, if speed and efficiency is the primary objective. But if so, why stop there? To further increase speed and efficiency why have elected representatives at all? The fastest and most efficient way to take decisions is to vest all power in a single individual – the Governor – and stop all this slow and tedious Democracy all together. Think of the money we would save! Imagine how speedy and efficient decision making would be! And the $64bn question is: how much difference would that actually make? Frighteningly little, I suspect. Already our Governor apparently has ExCo doing his bidding. I can’t remember the last time I heard of the Governor proposing something that ExCo rejected. Allow dubious investors to buy up vast tracts of St Helena for their doubtful projects? OK. Destroy fisheries and sell off the fishing rights to people overseas with local groups being officially excluded from the process? Also OK. So if LegCo has been muted and ExCo is no longer challenging what the Governor demands, we really don’t have a democracy here already. Recognising that (and saving a whole ton of money in the process and also improving speed and efficiency) has got to be the obvious next step. St Helena managed without democracy for over 300 years, from colonisation in 1659 until 1963. Should we declare the democratic experiment a waste of resources and consign it to history? I’m sure our councillors can find other jobs. Maybe they could start fishing .....

ERODING OUR DEMOCRACY

ERODING OUR DEMOCRACY

Remember the “ExCo Report”?  Instigated by Governor Gurr to improve democracy, after every ExCo meeting he gave a report of what was discussed and what was decided.

Anybody want to guess when we last had an ExCo Report?

This year there has been not one single ExCo report.  Zero.  The last was after the meeting on 12^th November 2019, and that was only seven paragraphs. Gov. Gurr’s reports sometimes filled two pages of the newspaper.

All we get now is a brief press release summarising the open agenda.  There is no official report of what was agreed.

Given the ExCo recently gave itself the power to make decisions alone, completely bypassing the LegCo Committee Stage, it is now more important than ever that we are told what ExCo is deciding.

Clearly telling the people what their governing body has been up to is no longer a priority.

For the people, BY THE PEOPLE

The consultant Jeremy Sarkin has proposed changes to how democracy works on St Helena.  The Governor says he needs advice on how Saints will feel about these changes, so a body has been set up to advise the Governor.

So far, so good, but how were the members of this body selected?  By public ballot, showing that they are representatives of the people?  No - they were hand picked to serve by the Governor himself.

Does anyone smell a rat?  The Governor will be advised by a bunch of people he himself chose for the role?

Is this a taste of how “democracy” is now to be done on St Helena?

I have nothing personal against the individuals selected but they are not – and cannot be – representatives of the people.  The people can only be represented by people they CHOOSE to represent them.  That is the foundation stone of Democracy.

Fortunately this selected body does not have the final say.  There will have to be a vote of the people before any changes can be made. So I suggest Saints completely ignore what it and the FCO/Governor decide and form an independent view on whether the proposed changes will or will not improve democracy on St Helena, and then vote accordingly.

(Details of the “advisory body” are in yesterday’s (14th May) Sentinel http://www.sams.sh .)

Offline

I used to commute into London by train.  I could have driven but it would have involved getting up more than an hour earlier and parking in London was expensive (and that was in the days before congestion charging added to the bill).  So every morning I arrived at Harpenden station in time for the 07:22 train to London.

Most mornings the train was late – I could probably count on the fingers of one finger the times it was on time – but usually only by a few minutes.  Allowing for further delays along the way I usually got to work sometime between 08:30 and 08:45.

Except that some mornings it was much more seriously delayed.  “Leaves on the line”, “the wrong kind of snow”, “points failure in outer Mongolia”, “train driver abducted by aliens”, the excuses were repeated continuously over the barely-intelligible announcements system.  We got as bored listening to them as doubtless did the poor guy who was paid to keep repeating them.  Nobody, it seems, knew when the problem would be fixed.  There was no estimate available for when our train would arrive and depart.

And to this day I remember that horrendous, deep-gut feeling of utter powerless.  There was no action I could take.  By that time in the morning if I were to give up, get into my car and attempt to drive in I would be unlikely to arrive at my desk before lunchtime.  I had meetings to attend, emails to receive and respond to, papers to read and write, but I could do none of these because of a fire in Basingstoke, or some such, and – most frustrating of all – nobody could tell me how long I would be waiting there.

So the only thing I could do was to stand there and wait, trying to resist the temptation to scream in frustration and kick the timetable board, hoping that somebody would fix whatever problem it was that was delaying our train.  Even if it wasn’t raining (100 commuters – 5mx4m waiting room) I remember those times as some of the most miserable of my life.

I was reminded of them this morning by today’s island-wide Internet failure.

I have, on my PC, 10 emails waiting to be sent, some urgent.  I have things I want – need - to do online.  I can do none of this.  I can’t even check Facebook to see what my friends had for breakfast and who has praised Trump for his masterly handling of the Covid-19 crisis.  I am sat here waiting for somebody to identify and fix the problem and reconnect St Helena to the outside world and I can do absolutely nothing to help make that happen.

On the bright side, I can at least make myself a cup of tea while I’m waiting, and I’m not getting wet or snowed-on, but the frustration at my powerless to improve my situation remains.

If St Helena does have to go on Lockdown due to Covid-19 I fear that our Internet system will not be able to provide the lifeline that has helped every other country to survive.  How will we cope?