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Pre-dawn Milking of Anansi’s Island-Cow
By Dennis A. Minott, PhD
July 23, 2026
The most profitable milking on Anansi’s Island takes place in hours beyond midnight and before day even light.
It occurs while the ordinary insects are still asleep, while journalists struggle with heavily redacted documents, while regulators await political clearance, and while citizens are reassured that there is nothing yet to cause concern. By sunrise, the pail is full, the cream has vanished, and those who own the cow are invited to be grateful for the mere smell of their family-animal's milk.
Nobody, naturally, dares admit to owning the cow.
That is the genius of modern exploitation. It no longer arrives wearing a pirate’s hat or carrying a colonial ledger. It arrives dressed as development, foreign direct investment, structural reform, transformation, energy security and strategic partnership. Whenever the public grows suspicious, it adds “stakeholder engagement” and schedules a public consultation well after the important decisions have already been executed by self-styled "no nonsense ministers".
The language grows grander as the public benefit grows thinner.
Anansi’s Island is governed by an unwritten rule: whoever controls the narrative controls the dairy.
The people are told that sacrifice is mandatory. Wages must be restrained. Statutory taxes must be rigorously collected from wage-earners. Public assets must be “rationalised”. Communities must surrender lands for infrastructure projects whose full prospectuses they are never permitted to inspect. Citizens must endure higher prices today so that prosperity may arrive tomorrow—usually by way of a press release, a memorandum of understanding, an artist's visionary illustration, and a glossy architectural rendering of smiling people standing beside infrastructure that does not yet exist.
Tomorrow, however, is the busiest liar on Anansi’s Island.
It is always approaching, never arriving. It promises high-value employment that degenerates into temporary subcontracts; national ownership that dissolves into long-term concessions; open market competition that hardens into private monopoly; and national development that somehow requires ordinary insects to remain permanently outside the great milker's gates.
The pre-dawn milking invariably begins with public resources and ends with private cream.
Consider the classic tourism yield: a resort complex breaks ground backed by statutory Productive Input Relief, sweeping tax waivers, and duty-free import passes. Yet, as economic data routinely demonstrates, up to sixty cents of every foreign-exchange dollar leaks straight back offshore through imported luxury goods, foreign management fees, external debt servicing, and foreign-held accounts. The host community is left walking through dusty lanes, selling craft through a perimeter fence, and hoping that seasonal, low-wage employment through 'connections' will compensate for permanent economic exclusion.
A natural resource is extracted, yet the soil nearby remains hungry. An energy project is announced, and before the first kilowatt-hour is transmitted to the grid, promoters, brokers, offshore consultants, and political courtiers have already been well buttered and fed.
The public is then shown the cow from a safe distance inland---away from all sand.
“Look,” says Anansi, pointing proudly. “Economic activity!”
Never mind who holds the pail.
Anansi’s friends, naturally, are exceedingly well shod. Even their shoes acquire Jamaican soul. Our musicians give them rhythm, our streets give them swagger, and our young people transform imported leather into 'Clarksy' legend. Yet the royalties retain their British passport and their HK private-equity bank account. Anansi’s Island supplies the attitude, authenticity, and global advertisement, then receives the privilege of purchasing its own cultural influence back at a wicked retail price.
This is extraction at its most elegant: the island creates the meaning while an entity elsewhere invoices the world for it.
The most successful milkers do not steal in darkness in the crude, old-fashioned, 'dutty business', brown envelope sense. They organise ceremonies. They cut ribbons. They establish corporate foundations.
They award 'much needed' paediatric medicine fellowships, sponsor research and school competitions, donate advanced laboratory systems, endow university chairs, underwrite international study tours to China, and deliver keynote addresses on nation-building. They speak solemnly about inclusion while ensuring that the contracts, concessions, exclusivity licences, tax arrangements, and privileged access remain carefully concentrated.
This is not basic brown-envelope corruption. That is just far too vulgar—and 'Babylon-bwoy' hand-cuff-risky besides.
Modern extraction prefers unquestioned respectability. It is less interested in breaking statutory rules than in influencing how the rules are written, who receives statutory exemptions, and who is invited to the table before the public even knows that dinner is already served.
The strategy is to make extraction appear decent, urgent, and mathematically inevitable.
Citizens are instructed that only one investor has the capital, only one foreign operator possesses the technical expertise, only one consortium can deliver, and only one deal is bankable. By the time the public eventually inquires whether alternative, domestic options were properly evaluated, the immediate response is that delay would damage investor confidence.
Investor confidence, on Anansi’s Island, is treated as a delicate bird.
Let that sit: ’tis a delicate bird'.
It must never be frightened by open competitive bidding, transparent public procurement, unredacted contracts, independent engineering assessments, or unforgiving arithmetic or other un-classy perils.
Citizens’ confidence, by contrast, is expected to be robust, to unflinchingly flow with anything.
It must survive procurement mysteries, massive cost overruns, secret side-letters, shifting timelines, selective tax enforcement, and the miraculous disappearance of accountability once elections are over. When citizens complain, they are accused of negativity. When journalists investigate, they are accused of undermining development. When technical professional insects raise engineering, financial, or environmental objections, they are warned not to politicise the matter.
This is how the elegant bandoolu milking machine protects itself: every fundamental question is reclassified as socialist losers'-economic sabotage.
Anansi’s greatest achievement, however, is psychological. He persuades the insects that the island’s poverty is caused mainly by the vile machinations of poor-people---and Haitians.
The struggling family is lectured about financial discipline while politically connected enterprises receive tax concessions, state guarantees, and negotiated relief. The small farmer is told to become efficient while imported lettuce enters through powerful distribution networks—supply chains unhindered by trade barriers. The microbusiness on Anansi’s Island must obey every rule, meet every deadline, and pay every fee, while the large-scale operator negotiates its obligations behind closed doors.
The young graduate is advised to innovate, but the gateways to capital, land, distribution, licences, and public contracts remain guarded by familiar hands. Then, with exquisitely exacted humour, the nation celebrates entrepreneurship.
On Anansi’s Island, the small shopkeeper takes genuine commercial risk. She may lose her savings, her inventory, and even her home. Yet promoters of major public utility projects may seek twenty-year take-or-pay agreements, sovereign undertakings, tax concessions, currency protections, and guaranteed rates of return. Private income is secured by public ratepayers whether projected demand materialises or not.
When capital demands that the state eliminate all market risk, it is no longer enterprise; it is a public levy disguised as private investment. That difference explains much of the wealth we too easily mistake for genius.
The true scandal is not that private people seek profit. Profit is the legitimate reward for enterprise, invention, discipline, and real risk-taking. The scandal begins when private profit depends upon public ignorance, public subsidy, public guarantees, and public silence.
It deepens when commercial losses are socialised while financial gains are fenced off. It becomes intolerable when those benefiting from the arrangement lecture lesser island insects about fiscal responsibility.
The cow belongs to every insect only when it is sick.
When it needs rescuing, refinancing, or repairing, it becomes a vital national asset. When it produces cream, ownership suddenly becomes complicated, confidential, and cloistered.
Still, the insects are not helpless.
Anansi’s power depends upon confusion, fragmentation, secrecy, and short public memory. His web weakens whenever citizens ask clear questions and insist upon complete disclosure:
Who owns the beneficial underlying asset?
Who financed it, and who carries the primary downside risk?
Who receives the revenue, and what specific tax exemptions or sovereign guarantees were offered?
What domestic alternatives were formally evaluated and rejected?
Who conducted the independent valuation, and who selected the contractor?
What happens if the project fails?
How much net value remains in Jamaica after dividends, debt repayments, imported inputs, royalties, insurance premiums, and management fees leave?
These are not anti-business questions. They are pro-country questions.
A serious nation does not discourage investment. It distinguishes investment from extractive sucking. It welcomes capital that builds local capability, expands Jamaican ownership, trains workers, transfers technology, deepens domestic supply chains, pays fair statutory taxes, respects host communities, and leaves the country stronger than it found it.
Milking well before day even light is different. It removes net value while leaving the animal hungry, sucked—and still strapped to the machine.
The remedy is neither envy nor hostility towards success. It is disciplined democratic housekeeping: mandatory open bidding, independent regulation, public beneficial-ownership disclosure, enforceable local-content commitments, publication of unredacted contracts, measurable performance targets, and financial penalties that actually bite.
Sunshine does not frighten honest investors. It merely inconveniences those who prefer milking before day ever light.
Jamaica’s challenge is therefore not merely to attract more projects, money, or headlines. It is to negotiate from knowledge, analytical rigour, and self-respect. We must stop treating every wealthy visitor as a messiah, every billioneerer as a development economist, and every memorandum of understanding as a miracle.
A memorandum of understanding is not a power plant, a factory, a university, a functioning farm, or a national transformation. It is a statement of possible intentions, often written so that almost everyone may later deny having promised anything at all.
We need public institutions capable of examining proposals before political excitement glues them into partisan epoxy. Parliament, regulators, professional associations, universities, journalists, and civil society must inspect the pail before the cream disappears—not complain politely after it has crossed the harbour.
Most of all, citizen-insects must reject the role assigned to them in Anansi’s script: taxpayers during failure, spectators during profit, and grateful recipients of stale crumbs during fresh super-profit celebration.
The island is not poor because it lacks milk. It is poor because too many pails are hidden, too many hands are privileged, too many bargains are concluded before dawn, and too much cream departs before six bells and breakfast in the dark of a a Borealia winter.
Anansi will continue smiling, of course. That is his well-rehearsed persona. Our duty is not to stop him smiling. Our duty is to count the cows, inspect the pails, publish the contracts, identify the beneficial owners, follow the cream—and ensure that those ordinary insects who truly own the island's cow are no longer the last to drink its milk.
Thank you for the benefit of your time.
Regards,
Dennis A. Minott, PhD, is a physicist, green energy consultant, and long-time college counsellor. He is the CEO of A-QuEST University/College Advising Online JA. Send feedback to a_quest57@yahoo.com , or on our WhatsApp Line: 1(876)2350534.
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