Dirty politics, emancipation and Independence

Martin Henry, Gleaner Writer

Today, August 1, is Emancipation Day, marking 176 years of freedom from slavery. In the same calendar week this year, Friday is Independence Day, marking 48 years of freedom from colonial oversight. We need emancipation from the corrupt and corrupting politics which has led the way in frustrating much of the vision of independence.

The nasty partisan handling of the motion for the extension of the state of emergency by the People's National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) as Opposition and Government in the Parliament and the ensuing tracing matches outside the Parliament have confirmed in the minds of many already disillusioned Jamaicans that the political parties alternating in government are at the heart of the problems afflicting the country.

The crime problem and extradition problem which led to the need for a state of emergency are to an extraordinary degree the special creations of the dirty politics of the country. Every crime report has said that. Our leading criminologist, Professor Anthony Harriott in a passage in the book he edited, Understanding Crime in Jamaica which I have quoted ad nauseam, has gone so far as to labelling the political parties "criminal organisations". "The seeds of the crime-politics phenomenon in Jamaica were planted and nurtured over decades of competitive party politics."

Using electoral fraud as his point of departure, Harriott put the matter on the table: "This raises the issue," he says, "of the political parties being criminal organi-sations.

"They are, of course, not criminal organisations in the same sense as organised crime networks, that is, their raison d'etre is not criminal engagement. On the contrary, their primary objective is to form the government of the country, and both major political parties have a record of developmental achievements. Nevertheless, the resort to criminal means of gaining office, and the alliances with criminals that are used for this purpose, give criminal networks considerable leverage on the parties and lead to the use of criminal means to systematically plunder the resources of the state once office is acquired.

"These activities of the political elite have profound implications for ordinary criminality, especially the normalisation of crime which is reflected in the view that criminality has become conformist behaviour."

The dirty politics of the country has been the principal stifler of our economic prospects and corrupter of our social values.

Clearly, we have to get rid of these parties in order to better advance towards the prospects of Independence anchored in that famous Independence Five-Year Development Plan, 1963-1968, which I have also quoted ad nauseam. And John Maxwell is never tired of reminding me of N.W. Manley and the technocratic pedigree of the plan which, in fact, helps the point that I am now making about the anti-development contributions of the political parties.

Development plans

The N.W. Manley Government of 1957-April 1962, in anticipation of Independence, had begun an Independence Development Plan. The PNP lost the April 1962 general election to Bustamante's JLP which in Government developed its 'own' development plan, of course, using the same technocrats and incorporating much of the Manley plan with more squabbles than credits.

Thanks, John, for helping me to improve the story.

So, in a way, right at the very start of our Independence road, the political parties, already 'criminal organisations' in the Harriott sense, have been at each others' throats to the detriment of the country. By 1966, the implementation of that fine Independence Development Plan, really bipartisan in origin although largely by unacknowledged borrowing rather than by collaborative consensus, was in shambles.

In the face of rising political violence, the first of our three states of emergency was declared in Western Kingston, the constituency of the Cabinet minister who was the principal architect of the plan as the minister of welfare and development and who was busy pouring state money into the preferential creation of Tivoli Gardens as a JLP enclave while fending off PNP attacks. We have never recovered.

Contrary to popular heroic history, Emancipation in the British West Indies was not won by black slave struggle. The empire had the means to maintain the system by force indefinitely but had lost the will. The Tivoli Gardens militia seriously miscalculated both the power and the newfound will of the state to infiltrate and capture the literal, not metaphoric, garrison they had constructed.

The empire lost the will to enforce slavery and granted freedom for a number of reasons, chief among them Christian revival and reformation which manifested itself in dogged and determined political and social action both on behalf of the enslaved in the colonies and the labouring classes in Britain whose condition was hardly better than that of slaves. And the Industrial Revolution had shifted the balance of power in politics and British society away from the landed gentry and the rich West Indian planter towards the new industrialist class which didn't need slavery for its prosperity.

Slavery dying

In hindsight, by about 1825 it was clear that slavery could not survive the 19th century in the British empire. The slave trade itself had been abolished in 1807. Others have continued. A recent AFP news story reported "Yemen group launches campaign against slavery". Yemen only outlawed slavery in 1962, the year of our independence, and people there are still held in bondage, albeit illegally.

Our political parties have actively created in this free country and maintained by force and violence cleansed enclaves in which people are held in real bondage. And most of the 40,000 or so murders of the last 40 years must be squarely attributed to the dirty politics of the country.

We did not fight for our independence. By and large it was handed to us. Perhaps that's part of the problem. In one of the few

outstanding cases of bipartisan action, the PNP and JLP collaborated to negotiate the details with the British authorities. Again, in hindsight, it is pretty clear that at the end of the Second World War an exhausted Britain was in a colony-shedding mode. The independence of India and Pakistan in 1948 started the domino effect.

The freed slaves at Emancipation did not resort to retributive violence. They went to church to celebrate freedom. The political parties have taught, organised and used violence to advance their ends at the expense of the country they aspire to lead and have led in equal measure.

The ex-slaves were illiterate and unpropertied. But they had their aspirations so many of which have been frustrated by government since then. At the top of the list they wanted land, which they clearly understood to be the capital base of their freedom.

Hunger march

I was fascinated to discover when I researched the history of Walkerswood community development in St Ann on behalf of Walkerswood Caribbean Foods, a product of that history, that the people of that community had staged their own land hunger march during the national upheavals of 1938 which pushed the formation of the PNP and later the JLP.

Land has remained a major national issue not resolved by the governments of independent Jamaica, although the Five Year Independence Development Plan promised resolution. I opened with anticipation, a recent email from the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) , 'More land titles registered in one year than ever before', expecting to find that thousands of titles had been issued. Only 925 new titles had been issued in a country with tens of thousands of unregistered parcels of land and a third of the population squatting, but this was 54 per cent of all titles ever issued by Land Administration and Management Programme (LAMP).

This has to be a joke. Money cannot be the problem. The people will pay for the cost of the service and the cost of expanding capacity. This is tardy wickedness against largely the poor whom the parties compete to love more but who have been shamelessly manipulated as political tools in the power struggle. At the same time, the powerful tourism sector has been handed a 10 per cent waiver on refurbishing material - another in the series.

Insist on reformation

The marauding political parties must be restrained and constrained if we are to progress beyond where they have managed to take us. Since they are not likely to self-destruct or can be replaced by peaceful and orderly means, we must insist on their reformation.

Trevor Munroe has quit the PNP to devote his time and energy to the fight against corruption. He should go on to form a 'bipartisan' group of ex-party members as a civic action group to help push the cleaning from their inside knowledge of the dirt. The Electoral Commission is leading proposals for the reform of party financing.

And many Jamaicans are fervently hoping that the new round of extradition requests for high-profile Jamaicans by the US Government may expose and rid us of a number of corrupt politicians and shock the political parties out of their defensive and hypocritical posturing into genuine internal reform.

But the biggest change agent will be an aroused and engaged civil society which understands that the target for the reform of governance cannot just be an abstract and amorphous 'government' but the searchlight must be turned upon the corrupt and criminalised JLP and PNP and the cleansing stream be diverted into them to either wash them clean or wash them away.

Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com