Apart from the sorry state of the national economy and the government's fumbling search for fixes, the next big point of discussion in Jamaica is the weather, or specifically, the extended drought.

That is understandable, for the relative lack of precipitation during the regular rainy season has begun to have an impact on our lives. The National Water Commission (NWC), the government company that has an effective monopoly on the production and delivery of potable water in the country, has instituted 'conservation' programmes. Or, more bluntly, the NWC is rationing the product to its customers by way of periodic lock-offs.

This, of course, makes sense, for this year's rainfall will be below the expected annual average of 51 inches. More specifically, the September/October rains failed to materialise when we might have expected in the region of seven inches. May, usually the next wettest month, was particularly outstanding this year.

Long-term penury

So, dry or drying taps have joined the economy in the pre-Christmas national discourse. If we pause momentarily to think about it, we will discover that both are related. Indeed, it may demand that we refashion the debate about water and the future of the NWC.

The point is that while the September/October drought may have been the immediate trigger for the current water shortage, more fundamentally, it is an index of the NWC's long-term penury and its inability to invest sufficiently in fixing decrepit delivery systems and building out new ones. It is also a failure, at the national level, of development planning, which has allowed new communities to spring up everywhere with inappropriate social and physical infrastructure, such as water and sewerage.

Frank discussion needed

With a properly invested and developed water management and delivery system, Jamaica ought not to face as deep a crisis as is now the case. Each year, even in years of below-average rainfall, billions of tonnes of run-off goes to waste, even as the big reservoirs in St Andrew are heavily silted.

The Blue Mountain region in the east gets perhaps six times as much rainfall as greater Kingston, but there has been no significant project in over two decades to bring water from that region of the country to the Kingston Metropolitan Area, which hosts the bulk of the Jamaican population. The NWC loses perhaps 60 per cent of the water it produces mostly because of its old, leaky pipes. It can't afford the cost of replacing them.

In this review of Jamaica's economic situation, there probably needs to be frank discussion about the state's continued ownership of the water company and the economic pricing of the product it 'manufactures'. We may have to seriously think about privatisation, with appropriate safeguards for the most vulnerable to ensure critical sanitation levels.

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