Mark Wignall | Dangers and mental stress of political polling

It was a normal day in violent political times as master pollster Carl Stone closed his gate and walked towards his beat-up VW Beetle. About a chain in the distance, on the same side of the crescent where he parked the car, was a man walking, to Carl, somewhat aimlessly.

Carl entered the car, extracted his handgun, sat around the steering wheel, one hand in his lap, and the gun comforted there. The ignition key was in his left hand. The man began walking towards the professor, pollster and newspaper columnist. Carl must have tightened his hand on the gun. As the man approached the car, Carl shouted, “Who you want. What yu want?”

The man told Carl a brief but all-compelling story. He had been sent to kill the pollster. He had been given a gun to complete the job. But the gunman did not know of Carl. So he asked around in his community and many of the people at street level told him that Carl was a ‘good man’. The man never told Carl who arranged the hit but, less than a week later, he pieced together a patchwork of dangerously petulant politicians.

At Carl’s request. the man carefully handed over the firearm and the next day he took it to a senior policeman friend of his.

It is one thing to conduct a poll which must show one party ahead. It’s entirely more stressing days and weeks to come after columns are written and the more granular findings paint peril for either the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) or the People’s National Party (PNP). The hate can run riot in the heads of politically attached gunmen and their bosses.

By way of social media, many vile and scandalous accusations have been hurled at Don Anderson, as his poll findings have upset many of the JLP diehards dwelling in the megabytes of platforms like TikTok.

Late last week, a PNP diehard was on TikTok castigating me for daring to criticise his party. “How much money are your political masters in the JLP dashing your way fi lie and write rubbish bout PNP”, he asked.

I know his sisters and brother. He has been captured in the PNP camp from he was a teenager. In most of his judgements of the PNP, he is willing to whitewash wrongs he has seen and knows of even when the local leadership of his party has acknowledged the faultlines. In his world, the PNP can do no wrong and argument with him is always fruitless.

NAVIGATING MIND OF POLITICAL DIEHARD

I’ll call her Suzy. She was 28 years old when I met her in the late 1980s. To Suzy, Seaga was God on earth.

Suzy’s entire childhood, adolescence and early 20s was a story of abandonment, physical abuse, gang rape and shameless alcoholism. When a very political aunt introduced her to JLP politics, Suzy found her world, her security blanket.

Suzy was a fixture in a little hole of a bar on Mannings Hill Road. One day, she was telling me how many times she voted JLP and the multiple places some elections. In joke, I said to her one day; “Suppose Seaga lop off all a yu finger dem, whey yu woulda use fi vote fi him?”

She raised her slender frame off the floor and almost shouted, “A woulda use mi toe dem fi vote JLP!”

One day, Suzie was crying in the little two-stool hole. “Anything you want tell me?” I asked.

Her babyfather wanted to get rid of her because of her excessive drinking. Strangely, Suzy doted on her three year old and could always find money for her. Suzy lived in her dead mother’s house with her babyfather and child.

“Him beat me up.” I could see the battered face. “Him sen wey mi pickney gone foreign wid him sister,” she said while hugging me. The only person in the whole world who loved her back was snatched away, probably for the best.

A week later, I went to the bar to look her up. The barmaid told me that she had swollen up around her midsection while drinking white rum and had ‘drop dung’ in the bar. She was pronounced dead at Kingston Public Hospital. Liver failure.

SOLUTION TO HIGH-RISE CRISIS?

A Gleaner article last week stated that “Delroy Chuck has lashed out at some housing developers allegedly involved in money laundering and whose “ill-conceived” high-rise apartment complexes are preventing Jamaicans in single-family homes from enjoying their privacy.”

Minister Chuck ,I sympathise with you, especially in trying to corral some of that dirty money funding housing development in places like Havendale and Meadowbrook where the covenants are not okay with multifloor apartments.

Whether the funds are drug-generated, scammer-generated or clean, the fact is, there is a very definite demand for these apartments. And I can appreciate that a householder in a standard house there is never in the mood to have a nightmare of a high-rise go up beside him.

The very obvious fix is, I will admit, not a simple one but, it is the direction to go. Continue on with the development (and the underdevelopment) of downtown Kingston by a massive push in high-rise housing downtown.

Many political administrations have dropped the ball in continuing on from Ocean Towers housing. The demand which had been identified from the late 1990s on was never ever tackled.

The uptowners wanted adequate parking, protected parking from car to apartment (like a skywalk) and, of course, reasonable prices.

The eyesores generated by the politics of exclusion – from Hanover Street to Southside – are now maintained by criminal gangs.

And our politicians who made it now find that it is best that they pretend it doesn’t exist. Minister Chuck is no stranger to garrison fixes and tinkering at the edges. He has the answers but, joined-up government has to be the mantra. Along with political determination.

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