Mark Wignall | Jamaica’s multiple personality disorder

Jamaica is like the love of a woman who will kiss you long, hard, and tenderly at high noon in Half Way Tree square, and at 6 p.m. in the quiet of the bedroom, she will hurl a shoe at your head. Two entities, neither versed in studying the physiology of the human being, captured it perfectly.

Said the latest Travel Advisory from the US Embassy in Kingston: “Local police often do not respond effectively to serious criminal incidents. When arrests are made, cases are infrequently prosecuted to a conclusive sentence.

“Families of US citizens killed in accidents or homicides frequently wait a year or more for final death certificates to be issued by Jamaican authorities. The homicide rate reported by the Government of Jamaica has for several years been among the highest in the Western Hemisphere. US government personnel under security responsibility are prohibited from travelling to the areas listed below, from using public buses, and from driving outside of prescribed areas of Kingston at night.”

And then the Financial Times (FT) said that Jamaica “... came very very close to complete financial and economic collapse (and presumably subsequent social and political disaster) in 2012”.

Said an IMF report: “Over the last years, Jamaica has successfully reduced public debt, anchored inflation, and strengthened its external position. It has built a strong track record of investing in institutions and prioritising macroeconomic stability. This allowed Jamaica’s response to recent global shocks to be prudent, agile, and supportive of growth.”

It is my view that the regular advisories issued by US embassies across the globe tend to adopt a worst-case scenario unless, of course, that country and the US are policy and ideology best friends. In the case of Jamaica’s trip from catastrophic debt to GDP, the FT writer says the country’s “economic performance over the past 10 years as arguably one of the most remarkable and radical but underappreciated turnaround stories in economic history”.

The FT writer ended with a bit of tongue in cheek, “Perhaps Jamaica should be sending a mission of its economic technocrats to Washington to help the US sort itself out?”

HOLNESS WILL PURSUE GOLDING RELENTLESSLY

Now this is highly unfair to Jamaica. Is the FT writer aware that a significant quantity of our people are emotionally unwell, and there is no reason to believe that the prime minister is not one of us.

The late Professor Freddie Hickling, who was an expert in mental health and radical transformation in how it was dealt with in the governmental arena, once exhorted us to “own our madness”. He said that considering the range of mental illnesses, over 70 per cent of Jamaicans were affected.

So if at this hour you feel as if it is in order for you to fly a grasshopper into the sun, fly away towards your freedom.

Which is to say we do not know if the PM can navigate the assimilation of this great news. At this time, who is to say if Holness is not in the mood to march into the midst of the many- times hapless PNP headquarters with terms of surrender drawn out in a totem pole of important conditions? Between Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, I am certain there is written more than a verse on the use of using fear and the horrors of pitched battle and defeat to ensure that no real battle or war is actually fought,

Each place that I visit, I sense an energy that is conducive if not to actual voting, then certainly to political debate at the community level. And I do not hear the PNP being featured as it would like, and definitely needs, at this time.

Mark Golding’s name is not a feature of those political discussions.

MYTH OF POLITICAL ALTRUISM

At its simplest, it goes like this. A man who would be a political leader walks up to a mound in the public square and bellows in his best verbal delivery. He asks you to give him power. In exchange, he promises to deliver a well-run community and village and town and country.

In the arrangement, he asks you to give him more power every five years just as long as he continues to work with you and provide you with a system made of the many parts that make you healthier, wealthier, and happy.

If he fails, there is another team, another political party. The same terms operate. But let us be quite clear. Although politicians have slyly covered themselves in the cloak of immunity from accusation of wrongdoing by placing huge packets of cash in their packets, it is our duty to almost clinically examine a man who chooses to ‘serve’ when it is more in the nature of man to be served or to be unbothered.

What really is there in the altruistic package? We cannot rule out that some people may get high on the mental rush, the oversized ego. I can understand a man of means wanting to walk around with what he believes is more than the sum of his parts.

He is invited to all the right parties, and the female company smiles with him on cue. He is called on to give advice when he would much prefer to gnosh on fois gras and sip top-class Remy.

Watching politicians handing out plastic packets of food and grocery items in the campaign season sickens me. But I suspect that were I a politician, I would have little time to adopt the noble virtue of altruism when a goodie bag of rice and tinned mackerel would more easily blunt those thoughts.

Coming back to reality is never without pain, especially after the long pretence that you had a noble objective.

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