Taino Heritage

Hotelier John Issa is hopping mad. What's he mad about? He is suggesting that the government's Tourism Enhancement Fund (TEF) has devolved into a "corrupt conspiracy." The TEF was established in 2004 and is supposed to be funded by assessing a fee on every tourist that enters the island, $10 from airline passengers and $2 from cruise ship passengers. Apparently the Port Authority, which has been tasked with the collection of the $2 from cruise ship passengers, has refused to do so. Both Former Tourism Minister Aloun Assamba and Port Authority President Noel Hylton were quoted in this article and neither of them seemed to have a satisfactory explanation as to whether or not the fee has been collected, why not and if it has been where it is. By Issa's accounting upwards of US $ 8.5 million should have been allocated to the TEF since its inception in 2005 from cruise ship passenger arrivals, but cruise liners have not been to paying over money they collect from their passengers .

Issa went on further:

He lamented that the law was written and passed with language which allows the fund to "use this great deal of money for anything remotely connected to tourism".

"So it has been used for, among other things, providing guarantees to American Airlines

, to fly delegations to the Olympics and elsewhere and to finance

the jazz festival," he said.

I would like to take a step back and ask why does this so called TEF exists in the first place? There is a cabinet minister with responsability for tourism, who then has a Director of Tourism who then heads the Jamaica Tourist Board which oversees marketing efforts. Then there is the Tourism Product Development Company established in 1996 and they are "the central agency mandated by the Government of Jamaica to facilitate the maintenance, development and enhancement of the tourism product." So in comes the TEF in 2004 established to ostensibly enact the "Master Plan." However in her presentation to Parlaiment in 2006 to clarify the purpose of the TEF, then Tourism Minister Assamba stated that the fund would not duplicate the functions of other agencies and would "...concern itself primarily with incremental work to add value to the tourism product and tackle some special challenges on a one-off basis," doesn't sound like a master plan to me. So what you end up with is a project like this which involves THREE government agencies spending JA$ 143 million to sweep a bunch of streets, trim trees and cut lawns. Or this gem of an idea, which essentially commits the government to subsidising the operations of American Airline flights to Jamaica, as if subsidising Air Jamaica wasn't enough already.

Seems to me that Mr. Issa is on to something. But what he has uncovered is that the government has created a complex web of operations within the tourism management apparatus which looks something like this mess. The TEF seems to me to be a totally unnecessary layer of bureaucracy and a sure fire formula for corruption and cronyism. Issa is mad that there is cronyism, I'm mad this thing exists at all.