Mark Wignall | Riding out the fear

You already know that five men were shot dead in Rockfort at a football game on Monday, October 21. This is the third mass murder in Jamaica in the last couple of months. You also know that Jamaica has an astonishingly high murder rate that has existed for so long that our people would die from culture shock should our murder rate sink to under 250 per year.

The burdensome but unvarnished truth used to be that up to the 1970s and part of the 1980s, the many grades of middle class in Jamaica hardly gave the homicide rate a thought. Some of the thinkers in the society saw the matter as useful for study. And verandah chat.

That knew that the gun mayhem was confined to the political garrisons where the politics of the time supplied the guns to uneducated youth so that Miss Bertha’s son would occasionally fire shots at his cousin living in the nearby zinc fence dirt track because Cedric ‘a wicked.’ Especially at election times.

The middle class didn’t mind gathering case studies just as long as the shooting remained within its confined social borders.

The cold reality is that within the last 20 years, that fantasy that the shooting would play by the rules and keep the mayhem locked away has been blown apart. Now, there is no parish, no village, no small town, no urban centre that is free from the crime monster. The painful reality has arrived. Jamaicans are living in fear.

One reader wrote, “The astronomical murder rate and high level of violence in Jamaica for decades means that the population is permanently stressed and immune to the number of deaths by violence around them. Moreover, it also means that the population has developed the sense that violence is a solution to any disagreement or dispute with fellow citizens.”

Every adolescent and adult Jamaican has a cell phone. The rise of the geographic spread of criminality in Jamaica and cell phone ownership may be less causative and only bearing a correlative relationship in the last 20 years. So that is fixed whether we remain a high-crime destination or we make radical fixes.

WHO AFTER DR NIGEL CLARKE?

Even if a politician is deemed the best finance minister ever, for a country like Jamaica, what is the greatest input that that minister can make to propel Jamaica into developed status? And that is if the person occupies the post for 10 years, and, who knows, has the use of AI.

Key would have to be buy-in by a significant percentage of our people. It would help if Jamaica discovered lithium somewhere under our soil. Or oil. The miracle that transformed Singapore in the 1960s was purely that. A miracle and a most unusual man in Lee Kwan Yew. For now, in Jamaica, because of the reality that Dr Clarke was. our people will be expecting his replacement to be like him, an exceedingly unkind expectation.

In a recent Don Anderson poll, the biggest concerns for those polled are inflation, cost of living, and crime. The PM must know that too, especially where the concern of high prices is staring him in the face just at the time when he has an election to win.

Dr Clarke leaves office at the end of this month, having given notice of his intent to resign as minister of finance about three months ago. The PM is yet to name a new minister of finance. A regular reader writes, ‘One would think that to assure economic stability and reassure the public the PM would have been quicker to name a new minister of finance. I suspect the PM does not think his current talent contains anyone up to the job.

“I also suspect that is why there was a rush to have Mr Matthew Samuda run in the JLP sure-seat in North East St Ann. Now that Mr Samuda won the election, he is eligible to be appointed minister of finance. But if he is the chosen one, I am concerned. What are his credentials?

AGRICULTURAL WARDENS WELL NEEDED

When I was a young child, I knew an old farmer who lived in a wooden shanty in a deep-rural spot in the misty hills of St Ann. In a square of land attached to the shack, the farmer planted cabbage and beans and ganja. Occasionally, he would reap a crop of coffee where the orchard ran from the rear of the small shack to a moss-covered pond nearby.

He had a donkey, two dairy cows, and the cream of all his crops, a sizeable herd of 25 goats. The goats were like money in the bank for the illiterate farmer. A daughter going to teachers’ college, two rams were sold. His younger brother making a trip on the deck of a banana boat to Liverpool in the 1950s, sell some goats.

The farmer came home late one Saturday night and did not move the goats. He rushed awake Sunday morning and walked with a bucket, cutlass, rope to move the goats to a new grazing area. His heart almost stopped beating.

As people at the time said, something live and vivid came out of him that morning, and it never returned. All the goats had been butchered and only the skins and bits of rope were left. There was blood everywhere within a space of about 30 square feet where banana leaves were spread.

In later days, he was driven to drink. In a year, the life went out of him for the final time in the season when the space around his shack was badly overgrown with weeds and bad memories.

I welcome the recruiting of agricultural wardens. I know that those who have been affected by the crop and livestock thieves have suffered, many in silence. I have seen it in St Elizabeth, Manchester, and Clarendon and in rural St Andrew. The change will be welcome.

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