The claim that in Jamaica issues arise quickly but die just as fast is probably not entirely without merit. It is the syndrome of the nine-day wonder.

This past week, for instance, two issues reported by this newspaper passed with scant public attention and even less comment, even from those who were most vocal when they were first raised.

But perhaps we ought to remind them that there used to be, or is, a government programme called Operation PRIDE - Programme for Resettlement and Integrated Development Enterprise.

In the 1990s, it was a big vote-catching scheme for the former administration. It had two attractive elements, for a society such as ours. It offered people at the lower end of the economic scale a means to come into land and provided them with a pathway to home ownership.

Idle government land, ostensibly, would be sold to people, who would form themselves into provident societies, which they would fund by periodic financial contributions. The Government would provide up-front the cash to put basic infrastructure on the land and would recoup these payments from the provident societies. The owners would also add value to the projects with sweat equity.

As it turned out, as is too often the case with many of these projects, things never quite worked the way envisioned. Operation PRIDE became mired in mismanagement and allegations of cronyism and corruption.

Indeed, in one parliamentary revelation, it turned out that perhaps a third of the multi-million-dollar portfolio of infrastructure projects went to a single company that presumably had connections with the Government.

damning report

Five years ago, the Angus Committee, set up by former prime minister P.J. Patterson, issued a damning report about the management of Operation PRIDE, which by then fell under the NHDC.

The Angus Committee found that more than a billion dollars had gone down the drain and that many millions of dollars had been paid out for work that was not accounted for. The project, the report found, was operated like "a brotherhood". Accountability was secondary.

So, last week, the housing agency of Jamaica, that is, the NHDC, in its umpteenth reorganisation, said that it would cost up to $20 billion to complete the several outstanding Operation PRIDE schemes. It promised to fund these from surplus it expects to generate from homes it intends to develop for sale on the open market.

That may be a good, feasible idea. It is just that no one seemed to notice.

At the time of the Angus report, people seemed angered by the waste of a good scheme and the seeming cronyism to which it had succumbed. Several persons, including the construction firm Danwill, its principal, Danhai Williams, and former NHDC staff members, faced criminal charges. They were accused of defrauding the company of $450 million.

In April of this year, the charges were dropped because the main witnesses were abroad and unavailable to give evidence. Last week, a civil suit brought by the NHDC against Danwill to recover $260 million was thrown out by the courts on a technicality. The documentation, including reports from auditors, were not in place.

The question is: Who's accountable? And why do we so easily forget?

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