Tell PM the truth on crime – Knight

When senior Opposition senator KD Knight painted many political figures who “surrounded” Prime Minister Andrew Holness as “sycophants” during a debate Thursday on three motions to extend states of emergency in different parishes, members on the Government side were seemingly aghast at the feisty designation.

And immediately after Knight’s presentation, Government senator Ransford Braham rose and quickly dismissed the suggestion that those political advisers of the head of Government were self-seeking flatterers.

Knight argued that while the Government was reporting progress in the fight against crime under the states of emergency, the number of murders committed in 2019 exceeded that of the previous year.

“If we luxuriate in failure and then comfortably define it as success, then we are going to have a problem. You are thinking that you are doing well when your own analysis is showing you that you are not,” said Knight, adding that the Government should do more to fight crime or else the society would languish in despair.

Knight indicated that those politicians close to the prime minister were fearful of challenging his approach to fighting crime through states of emergency because they did not want to upset the proverbial apple cart.

“As one who has been in government, I can empathise with you; I didn’t cause it to happen to me, but if you are surrounded by sycophants … what they are thinking about more than anything else is their self-preservation, then they are going to agree with you and cause you to feel as if you are omniscient. They think you are omnipotent. You have become all wise because they think you are all powerful and their status depends on the exercise of your power so they don’t help you,” Knight said.

However, Braham fired back saying that the murder rate has been galloping in Jamaica for decades with previous administrations introducing special squads and putting in place certain crime-fighters, yet the numbers kept going up.

“I am not going to call my friend mad or crazy since he was a part of those strategies. I am not going to suggest lunacy. I am not going to suggest that those who surrounded the leaders at that time including the persons present here are sycophantic,” Braham declared.

“I looked at you very carefully and you didn’t believe a word you say,” Braham quipped, as he responded to Knight.

“I have to repudiate the suggestion that was made, tongue in cheek as it was, that the prime minister surrounded himself with sycophants, and all that they do in order to eat a food is to say, ‘yes, yes, yes’,” he said. “Not true, and you shouldn’t say it because you know better,” Braham chided Knight.

The Opposition senator had earlier contended that the Government did not appear to understand that its duty relates to the entire society to secure the whole country.

He said that while crime had been reduced in some areas where states of emergency have been declared, there were other areas where crime was getting out of control.

“If you believe in the state of emergency, be bold and place it over the entire island,” Knight said, reasoning that if the Government’s analysis was that crime had escalated to “so extensive a scale as to endanger the public safety”, then this should apply to all Jamaicans across the entire island.

MIXED RESULTS

Leader of Government Business in the Senate, Kamina Johnson Smith, said that while some success has been achieved in reducing the overall murder rate last year, there were mixed results. “We ended the year with an overall murder rate of 3.5 per cent higher than the previous years.”

However, she said that the Holness administration has made significant investment in national security that has signalled the Government’s continued commitment to ensuring that “we make a fundamental shift in how we treat with national security.

“We have undertaken the highest expenditure by any government and four times the budgetary allocation spent under the previous four years $41.6 billion as against a previous $10.48 billion in national security.”

At the end of a four-hour-long debate, the motions for extending the states of emergency in Hanover, St James, Westmoreland, Clarendon, St Catherine and the St Andrew South Police Division received the nod of the Senate and will expire in April. For those present for the vote, only Opposition senator Damion Crawford voted against the motions while Dr Andre Haughton abstained. Four senators were absent.