It occurred to me this week that we really have no idea how to do anything in this country. We don't.

We find ways to mess up the simplest of things. Things that get done in other countries in days or weeks, take us years to do. We don't even know how to enforce simple laws. I wouldn't be surprised if someone asked a lawmaker about laws and their response was, "Laws? What are those?"

We also find a way to inject politics into everything, including the way we dress. A Comrade will have a hard time wearing green while a Labourite will have problems wearing the colour orange.

For a while I lived on a little island out in the Caribbean and while they had their problems, they managed to get some things done that we would take eons to do.

electricity down

Take this bid for someone to supply the country with 360mw of energy, a move that should help get the cost of electricity down, something that would help make Jamaican-manufactured goods cheaper and make them more competitive regionally and globally.

Should that happen, it is likely that companies that export and even those that don't, buoyed by cheaper energy prices could expand, employ more people and help build in the incredibly weak economy. With that in mind, one would have thought that getting bids in and selecting one of them to get the work done, would be something we would have sought to get done with some alacrity.

Elsewhere in the world, that would have been the case, but not here in Jamaica. It's absolutely incredible how we find a way to botch the simplest of things.

When I was in St Maarten I saw the government there put a major project out to tender and staged a public selection and announcement of the winning bid within months. There were not even independent then. We have been at this independence thing for half-a-century and not even these simple things we can manage to get right.

Then take this Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission (JADCO) thing that has been a global embarrassment for us. I have a Google alerts thing in my email that selects news stories from all over the globe that have any mention of the word 'Jamaica'. Every day hundreds of emails come in of stories about Jamaica. Some are about Jamaica, Queens in the United States, but the majority are about our little island in the sun.

anti-doping issues

For the past few days, there have been hundreds of stories about Jamaica's anti-doping issues. From Turkey to the USA, the headlines read, 'WADA slams Jamaica's anti-doping body', 'Jamaica's anti-doping body under scrutiny', 'Another athlete tests positive as Jamaica anti-doping body flirts with suspicion'.

While all this is going on, we don't seem to have any idea how to stem the flow of negative news. Oh, by the way, the other headlines are not flattering either as they speak to our crime, weak economy and Dudus.

I just wish we could get something good for a change because I can just imagine that from the outside looking in, we look like a bunch of idiots who can't get anything right.

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