I never thought I would live to see the day when Jamaican people pray for Jamaica to be affected by a tropical depression.

Prior to this year, we prayed for the island not to be doused with torrential rain which lead to flooding, homes being washed away and roads being blocked or collapsing. But I suppose desperate times call for desperate measures. These days we are watching the west coast of Africa like hawks, hoping the next low-pressure system has our name written all over it.

I suppose this is what you get when you live in a country where not much makes sense. Jamaica's public debt is near two trillion dollars. That's the kind of money your grandchildren's grandchildren will be paying off. The thing is for all that money we borrowed we haven't seen much in terms of anything where that money has gone to good use. Our roads are a mess.

Potholes are everywhere, some of them as deep as swimming pools. But even more importantly, the National Water Commission still uses pipelines that were laid when dinosaurs still walked the earth.

leaky pipelines

For all the money we borrowed, no one thought that they should have used some of it to upgrade the leaky pipelines that have caused hundreds of millions of gallons to run to waste each day, hence there is hardly a drop of water in any of the two reservoirs serving the metropolitan centre of this country, which is home to perhaps or even more than half the island's population.

Out in rural Jamaica, it's even worse, because out where the rivers are, people still have to walk to community standpipes to fill buckets.

I keep harping on the fact for years that we live with a daily warning in the form of our national anthem which we hear daily.

Give us vision lest we perish

Knowledge send us Heavenly Father

Grant true wisdom from above.

Those words don't seem to mean anything to the people who shape our future nor the people who follow them blindly because we never pay attention.

lack of vision

The clearest indication of this is that we spend more time mimicking the drum beat after each 'Jamaica' in the anthem. Jamaica (BOOM), Jamaica (BOOM) - Jamaica Land We Love - more than we do to the actual meaning of the words.

It is because of that lack of vision and attention paid to all the wrong things that we have come to be characterised by why we are now praying for a disaster to strike just so we can have water running from our taps once again.

It is that lack of vision why we didn't see it fit to use some of those trillions we borrowed to install proper water-harvesting systems that would have benefited greatly in times of prolonged drought. It is also because of the absence of vision why we keep doing things that help cause the droughts we experience every year.

generate rainfall

There was a time when the hillsides surrounding Kingston used to be covered with trees. Trees, as you know, replenish the oxygen supply and are critical to the water cycle that helps generate rainfall. These days, the hillsides are covered with concrete.

So now we pray for rain. We pray for a flood because only then can we be assured that the reservoirs which are near-empty will be full again because that will allow us to continue to charge blindly through the night without a plan, without vision; practices that as of right now have us plodding along without water.

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It is because of that lack of vision and attention paid to all the wrong things that we have come to be characterised by why we are now praying for a disaster to strike just so

we can have water running from our taps once again.