Mark Wignall | Retail politics is the real deal

A little over a week ago, I received a call from my old friend [stress on ‘friend.’ Not on ‘old.’] Pearnel Charles Sr.

He wanted to talk about a university study that highlighted results that were seriously unfavourable to politicians and Jamaican policemen. Our people were convinced that politicians were corrupt.

And Pearnel, not a man to suppress a view that deserves expression, told me that many researchers and journalists do not understand the stark reality of politics. It is not that he was in any mood to defend corruption. “Much of our politics is personal, helping out flesh and blood people at the constituency level.”

Then he posed a question to me. “Many years ago, I contacted a journalist who had said he wanted to spend a day with a few MPs. I called him, picked him up at his gate, and he spent the day with me moving through my constituency. I am going to ask you to guess which journalist that was.”

He had me stumped. I’ve met with all sorts of politicians, and through my own arrangements, have spoken with a few of their ‘friends’ in the underworld of retail politics. While I was trying to think of the name of a few well-known journalists, he said,”It is Mark Wignall.”

The youngsters will have to learn.

And then I remembered. “Mark, do you remember what you said about halfway through our tour?” I was trying to summon enough of my brain cells and electro-chemical energy operating in that space to recall.

“You said to me that there is no way you could do that and that I was crazy, mad, for doing it.” Then I remembered.

“A man comes to me with a prescription for his heart problems or blood pressure. What should I do? Send him to Parliament to make a complaint?

“A poor woman’s son has badly cut up a finger while he was in the bush looking wood for the fire at home. She needs taxi fare to reach the clinic at the town square. I cannot employ the luxury of waiting. I have to go in my pocket and help. And when the media finds out and adds it up over many months, I am seen as corrupt.

“I help out a poor man by giving him a farmwork ticket. Fifteen years later, two of his children have graduated from university, and he sends me a letter thanking me for exposing him to reading and writing. Is that corruption?”

After an election over a decade ago, I travelled with another politician, who was just about the opposite of Pearnel Charles. Almost every corner of the constituency where he went he spoke to small groups of people and filled their guts with what were very obviously empty promises. He knew that I was reading the play.

“Why do you do it?” I asked.

“You can’t solve all the problems in the constituency, Mark. But you can make a whole lot of people see you. And they rely on the hope you sell them.”

In a perverse way, I respected him. He was a con man first. And a politician into a con job second.

YOU HAVE FORFEITED YOUR LIFE

On the day of that dark night when you were born, I was not there to place a crown of thorns on your head. Neither did I present you with a huge boulder to roll up an impossible hill.

In your trip to adulthood you would have had some bad times and I would have had my fair share. As an adult, you made the choice one late evening to leave your home and travel to a neighbouring district to seize a pre-teen girl, to abuse her body and then kill her. In the broader narrative, it may be relevant to you that your own parents abused you.

But guess what. I have expressed enough empathy to the point that a coldness is now occupying where empathy once lived. I hate that new me, but that is where I am.

For now, I am certain that you will understand that as you rode out, your troubles and decisions were not relevant to me. And maybe the State must cancel your relevance. In essence, you have signed out of existence.

The ferocity of the violence in this country has got to me, to the point that I am now in support of capital punishment. My previous position against it was centred on what I feared would be corruptness in the police investigations and systemic social bias in the justice system, which could cost an innocent man his life.

The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) government is left with a skilful intermix of words to soothe us, to rest up until the next batch of syrup is made. Short-term violence reduction is not enough. The Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) is probably too close to getting a whiff of power so much so that it cannot juggle a pack of its own words to make a believable promise.

Jamaica has always been violent. Technology has brought efficiency to criminality, and in the chase for a fast life, many of our young people, especially those in the rough, inner-city schools, are constantly devaluing life. Listen to social media. Listen to friends talking. In bars. At corner shops. Even our jokes border on violence.

A few of our people are getting the hang of street demonstrations in getting their points across. But the big one, that of bringing pressure to bear on street demonstrations in all parishes on murders and child abuse, will not happen. A violent Jamaica Constabulary Force is in place.

Our university students are timid. US visas to be sought five years from now cannot afford the present involvement. And red flags.

If it is done by the Opposition PNP and it gets out of hand, the PNP is toast for the elections in 2025. And it is too delicate a time in the immediate objectives of the JLP government for a breakaway faction to go there.

In the meantime, another state of emergency is our immediate future.

Mark Wignall is a political and public affairs analyst. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and mawigsr@gmail.com.