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Why do nations that ignore expertise keep on baptising their mistakes in mula?

In the English-speaking world, place names are rarely innocent. Long after speeches fade and policy papers yellow, names remain—etched into maps, whispered by locals, inherited by children who were never present at the original decision. They are history’s shorthand. And among the most revealing of these names is one that recurs with uncomfortable frequency across the Anglophone globe: “Folly.”

According to the GeoNames global gazetteer, more than 36,147 places in English-speaking territories bear the word Folly in whole or in part. The term does not imply madness. In the British cartographic tradition Jamaica inherited, a folly marks something more precise—and more damning: a confident but ill-judged enterprise. A project launched with authority, optimism, or wealth, yet undertaken without sufficient respect for land, water, climate, or economics. When it fails, the name remains as verdict.

Jamaica, tellingly, has three officially named follies.

Old Folly in St Ann recalls a grand agricultural or estate ambition that collapsed—perhaps a mill built in the wrong place, a settlement imagined without regard for soil or rainfall, an investment that could not survive reality. The plan disappeared. The name endured.

Folly Point in Portland offers a sharper coastal warning. Among English-speakers, such names often mark misjudged maritime works: a jetty battered by currents, a beacon wrongly sited, a trading post conceived from the map rather than from the sea. The coast corrected the planners. Memory did the rest.

And Folly in Clarendon speaks quietly of plantation-era overreach—irrigation schemes, crops, or mills that failed to respect drought cycles, soil limits, or shifting markets. Again, the name judged the decision, not the dreamer.

What binds these places is not incompetence, but disregard for expertise. Nature and economics were consulted too late—if at all. The land was expected to comply with intention. It did not. The map remembered.

That history matters now.

In the unsettled aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, western Jamaica has been stripped of comforting illusions. Rivers have reasserted their ancient paths. Floodplains have reclaimed their authority. Coastal systems have demonstrated a profound indifference to press conferences and promises. This should be the most evidence-disciplined rebuilding moment Jamaica has faced in several generations.

Instead, what we are witnessing is troublingly familiar.

Post-Melissa recovery under the Holness administration increasingly resembles a theatre of urgency rather than a discipline of wisdom. Speeches multiply. Cameras roll. Well-heeled voices rush forward to declare—often with striking confidence—that only deep-pocketed investors can rescue Savanna-la-Mar, Darliston, Black River, Whitehouse, and their neighbours.

What is conspicuously absent from centre stage are the people whose knowledge exists precisely for moments like this.

Urban planners are marginal.
Hydrologists are scarcely heard.
Civil engineers are consulted late, if at all.
Community elders—those who remember where water used to run—are treated as anecdotal colour rather than strategic counsel.

In their place stands a familiar constellation: Kingston-centred decision-making, the gravitational pull of large developers, and a quiet distrust of local intelligence. This is not recovery. It is reenactment—the replay of the very cognitive error that gave us Old Folly, Folly Point, and Folly itself.

If this continues, Jamaica will not need metaphors. The map will supply them.

Already, one can imagine how popular memory works—patient, unsparing, and eventually precise.

One redevelopment may yet be recalled as “Andrew’s Folly.”
Another as “the Two Michaels’ Folly.” And if ministerial improvisation continues to eclipse evidence, an entire region risks being remembered—informally at first, then indelibly—as something other than Cornwall: Tufton-McKenzie.

Maps do not rush. They wait decades to deliver judgment. But when they do, they are ruthless in their accuracy.

Let us be clear: hurricanes do not create follies. Responses do. Disasters merely strip away pretence. They reveal whether a society respects expertise or confuses wealth with wisdom, urgency with insight, spectacle with substance.

Post-Melissa reconstruction should be Jamaica’s most deliberate national exercise since Independence—a chance to rebuild towns according to hydrology rather than haste; to site housing with respect for flood recurrence, not investor convenience; to restore livelihoods without repeating the extractive habits that left communities exposed in the first place.

Instead, we risk mistaking motion for progress.

Wisdom would insist on slower speech and faster listening.
Wisdom would seat hydrologists before seating developers.
Wisdom would invite elders before inviting investors.
Wisdom would recognise that resilience is engineered long before it is announced.

The tragedy of a folly is not that it was attempted, but that it was warned against—and attempted anyway. Every Jamaican folly had its Cassandra. Someone knew. Someone spoke. Someone was ignored.

Hurricane Melissa has given us a rare national gift: the chance to choose differently while memory is still fresh—while silt lines still mark the walls, while culverts still gape, while shorelines still bear witness. If we squander that gift, the land will not argue with us. It will simply remember.

And one day, without ceremony, a child will ask why a place bears an odd name. The answer will come as it always does with follies: because once, power spoke louder than wisdom—and the land had the final word.

Jamaica deserves better than another quiet footnote on the map.
It deserves the humility to learn—before the name is written.