NOW MORE THAN EVER JAMAICA NEEDS A NEW STADIUM

The ISSA/Grace Kennedy Boys and Girls Championships comes up this week and the usual rush for tickets, Grand Stand tickets, is at its usual peak. Come Wednesday, tickets will again go on sale and on that day there will be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of fans who will be disappointed yet again that they were unable to secure Grand Stand tickets. Bleachers tickets are available but the demand for them is a lot less, so the suffering continues.

The National Stadium is 50 years old. At the time the stadium was built Jamaica’s population was about a million. There was about 380,000 persons living in Kingston. The capacity of the stadium is just about 30,000, five thousand of those seats are in the Grand Stand. Jamaica’s population has tripled since then, the population of Kingston and its immediate environs, about four to five times what is was back then. The size of the stadium however, remains unchanged. This is why the Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA) has embarked on some innovative ways to keep the growing number of fans of Champs engaged, easing their frustrations enough to prevent them from getting turned off all together.

It is pointless to lament the lack of vision of our politicians even as we hail the far-reaching vision of Norman Washington Manley without whom Jamaica would not have a stadium today; at the very least a national stadium. In the 50 years since the stadium was built, Jamaica has gone on to build an even stronger brand as a sporting nation. Trinidad and Tobago over the same period, has built several stadia to help foster the development of their athletes and sporting programmes. And yes, people will argue that Trinidad has oil, as if that is the explanation for everything that happens there but what it actually is, is that their leaders had a vision for what things could be like down the road. Here in Jamaica, the only thing our politicians plan for is elections.

Hence Jamaica finds itself without a modern facility to show off our talented track and field athletes, footballers, swimmers, boxers; all the sports people that have helped make Jamaica a major sporting nation. A larger stadium could have been built during the 1970s, but political upheaval and foreign interference reduced Jamaica to a Third World hell hole. We have been trying to recover ever since.

To build a  proper stadium facility now will cost somewhere between US$300 and $400 million, just about the same amount of money the country borrowed from China for the Jamaica Infrastructure Development Programme (JDIP) that, not surprisingly, was derailed by wanton mismanagement. Despite this we should try to raise the money from investors and have the building managed by people from overseas so we can keep the construction under budget and have it completed in reasonable time.

In the meantime, a proper plan needs to be devised to have that new  stadium consistently generate revenue to suit investors, as well as add money to our coffers and employment for Jamaica. If I should start to list the possibilities that a modern facility would bring I would be writing into next week, suffice it to say that with a little creative thinking and innovation, the potential is significant. Yes, we are broke but getting out of poverty requires visionary thinking and leadership and while our political leaders might be deficient of those skill sets, there are people here who can make this a reality and Jamaica can get the modern stadium it deserves.