What's new about this year?

Errol Hewitt, Contributor

"... till I die, I will not put away my integrity from me. My uprightness and my right standing with God I hold fast and will not let them go; my heart does not reproach me for any of my days and it shall not reproach me as long as I live." Job 27:5-6

We all hope that this year can be not just a better year than last year but that it will be the real beginning of our country's social and economic development. We all hope that this year can be one which Crystal - the slave who died in Jamaica from a hunger strike protesting her enslavement - and whose body was reinterred in Ghana in 1998, or Pappa Sharpe, or George William Gordon, or Norman Manley or Bustamante would have visualised as the Jamaica and quality of governance they had hoped for in the midst of their struggles.

It is said that 'hope is the mother of all men', that in our guts there is an element which wills us not to surrender but to fight on in hope. If this is so, our people have a double portion of hope, suffering all these decades since Independence as they have and still seem patiently expectant. Migration has been a crucial safety valve and may well have been an important deterrent in avoiding the social unrest and explosion which has ravaged many other countries. The reduction of the middle class and its influence has robbed the masses of their traditional leadership to press their cause. Bizarrely, it is the private sector, sections of which have been regular bedmates of successive governments which with commercial demand substantially reduced, is now filling this vacuum. The question here is for how long?

The Realities

But the reality is that despite the dramatic success of the debt-reduction exercise, the national debt has been steeply increasing to the point where if it were changed to J$50 bills, these, joined end to end/side to side, could more than cover the surface of Jamaica and its dependencies. Unemployment has increased by the tens of thousands, poorly conceived policies and inadequate planning have hobbled industry possibilities, agriculture is still too narrowly defined and bereft of proper and in-depth marketing, education is still based on the colonial concept and the masses are still made to suck limes with still limited prospects.

Even more worrying is the very strong impression that our young people are uninterested in their past, added to the fact that skin bleaching is on the rise, as is the incidence of our young women with 'part-less' caps on their heads of hair from the backstreets of Mumbai or horse's tails from Kentucky. Is it a rejection of their history, race and ethnicity and, therefore, who they are - or is it just a passing youthful phase? What is sure is that "a people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots".

Irreplacability of Government

There is no doubt a strong national belief that the limitation to our progress has been largely caused by corrupt, inept governance and our future progress is questionable because any progress is hinged on us having a capable and committed government. Contrarily, we have a prime minister whose statements attest to the fact that he understands our problems, yet, he is either incapable to put tyre to road to do the last mile or - for whatever reason - unwilling to apply the solution. Many of these solutions require minimal expenditure such as legislation ensuring the Charter of Rights for citizens or the term limitation of prime ministers, etc. His credibility has evaporated with his utterly embarrassing and disastrous - to our international reputation - bunglings over his Manatt, Phelps & Phillips (MPP) blunder, and his seeming difficulties with senior, independent-thinking and competent Jamaicans [e.g. the Stephen Vasciannie and Public Service Commission issue]. His utterances are now taken with the proverbial pinch of salt and with much speculation, making this a major issue for his party, especially as there is no identifiable alternative within it. As such, the party seems to be gearing for early elections before beliefs harden or the situation worsens.

In the midst of this, the Opposition, which has a rich history of middle-class anchorage and intellectual application to problems and policies, has stated its readiness as the alternative government, but is still unable to produce a realistic Progressive Agenda as promised, and is without a defined programme of its intent.

The Church, which represents the body of Christ, on whose shoulders rests the Government, seemed to have suffered further setbacks because of a surge among some of its pastors for public recognition and a popular wave for seeking academic excellence and its prestige and title. Mr Golding has been able to invite a church leader to leave his official role as witness to the nation to become spokesman for his policies. In the interim, he has brought forward his plans for casinos - a policy the Church was adamantly opposing, but now it seems distracted from its role.

The Political Liabilities

As a result of decades of disappointment from successive governments, there is increasing scepticism about governments, politics and politicians. This has degenerated into a strong belief that if Jamaica was literally floating on prime-grade oil, if Phillip Paulwell's gold mines in St Catherine to Negril were underlayed with pure gold, the Blue Mountains were solid platinum, the Long Mountains were palladium and our other mountains had large quantities of rhodium, ruthenium and osmium, Jamaica would still be poor after 2030, and the masses still lining up at the side doors of foreign embassies.

Hope burns eternally, perhaps, but the reality of decades of political leadership and the reality of the history of our governance make hope and confidence in our political leadership an uphill struggle. While citizens have confidence in the possibilities of our natural resources and the still-untapped potential of our population, yet they are watchful that, as in the past, these will be squandered, corrupted, ignored or simply spoken into silence by our political leaders. What is uncontestable is the fact that the achievement of the people's hopes will never be accomplished without a thorough, urgent reform of our political system, its processes, the role of the politicians, political parties and an emphasis on the importance of transparency, integrity and commitment to country. And this has to happen now because the next generation of politicians is now upon us, and what we see is not encouraging; the Jamaica Labour Party's G2K leader, for example, is able, perhaps not convincingly, to debate on any side of any topic, yet he seems neither to have his own opinion nor be able to chart the way forward.

We need competent political leadership which will champion the rights and best interests of the people and, for a change, focus on the real needs of the masses: a leadership with integrity, that is honest, sincere and has the same passion for country as evidenced in Veronica Campbell on the champion's rostrum at the Athens Olympics in 2004.

Threading Water?

What of the future?

Our government service is now only mediocre and informally organised in fiefdoms. Its current reform is not directed towards a development path, but simply to ensure efficiency. Contradictorily, the saving of civil-service jobs mainly for political benefit has not been met with specialised training preparatory to the broadening of our industrial base, which is an imperative for our socio-economic development.

Our minister of transport, despite the depressed economy, has, having as a septuagenarian won the chairmanship of his party, been strutting proudly but with scarcely an utterance on the traffic situation in urban Jamaica, with its surfeit of cars, traffic jams in residential communities, motorists making up their own rules as they drive, and no solution in sight. This is a huge, complex and costly problem which is inescapable for now and the future.

Our Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been effectively, though not officially, subsumed into the Office of the Prime Minister, and some career diplomats must suspend their progress to facilitate whoever finds favour with the politicians. The fact that the responsible minister has not resigned is testimony to the poverty of our circumstance.

Science and technology, and engineering, are crucial to our future. Where, for example, are the plans and concrete action for the functional linkage between the Scientific Research Council and the high schools and colleges; between the Bureau of Standards and the engineering faculty of University of Technology, starting, for example, with testing? Our leaders, what is going to be new in this New Year? It has to be you.

"One dare not go to bed with the roof on fire." (Yoruba) from The Black Book of Proverbs

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