One of the few pre-election promises that Prime Minister Bruce Golding has kept is that he would not use the title reserved for Jamaican prime ministers, "the Most Honourable". He felt then, as perhaps he does now, that such a title should be deserved, not just conferred. There were those who felt at the time of his avowed decision that he was seeking to take the moral high ground and so thought that he had done the honourable thing.

Based on the revelations surrounding the Manatt, Phelps and Phillips affair and Mr Golding's own admissions in Parliament, it behoves him to do the honourable thing and step aside as the country's chief servant. Failure to do so may well in the long run gain him the dubious distinction of being a most dishonourable prime minister of Jamaica.

No doubt, Mr Golding must have persuaded himself at the outset of this great conspiracy that he was acting in the best interest of the Jamaica Labour Party of which he is leader and ultimately the country.

It is safe to assume that Mr Golding loves his party as well as his country, and so he has been torn between two lovers. The politician in him would have dictated that he put his party first and Information Minister Daryl Vaz confirmed this in an interview. But then, Mr Golding has also sworn to uphold the Constitution of Jamaica and allegiance to all those tenets of good governance. Is it that Jamaica must forever take second place in the current scheme of things?

Were Mr Golding not prime minister, or for that matter if Minister of Justice and Attorney General Senator Dorothy Lightbourne and Solicitor General Douglas Leys were much lower down on the food chain in this JLP administration, they would all have been axed and brought into public disrepute as has happened to a number of highly placed civil servants who have felt the wrath of this Golding administration. But, alas, "puss and dog don't have the same luck" and in this scenario, the same stick that lick black snake may not necessarily lick yellow snake!

According to Wikipedia, "The crime of obstruction of justice includes crimes committed by judges, prosecutors, attorneys general, and elected officials in general. It is misfeasance, malfeasance or nonfeasance in the conduct of the office. Most commonly, it is prosecuted as a crime for perjury by a non-governmental official primarily because of prosecutorial discretion. Modern obstruction of justice, in United States jurisdictions, refers to the crime of offering interference of any sort to the work of police, investigators, regulatory agencies, prosecutors, or other (usually government) officials. Often, no actual investigation or substantiated suspicion of a specific incident need exist to support a charge of obstruction of justice. Common-law jurisdictions, other than the United States, tend to use the wider offence of perverting the course of justice."

Given all the available information in the public domain, is it reasonable to assume that our esteemed prime minister may be deemed to be a person of interest by the United States authorities? And what of Mr Douglas Leys and Mr Harold Brady; not to mention the goodly Senator Dorothy Lightbourne, in all of this? I am not here casting any stones in the pig pen but if I should dare to do so, would there be squeals of mea culpa?

It has been argued that Christopher "Dudus" Coke played a very pivotal role in the 2007 general election which the JLP won by a narrow margin. It has also been posited that the "President" was a most important cog in the wheel of that major political organisation. West Kingston, aka Tivoli Gardens, is also known to be the JLP's premier bastion and has been described by Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin, former police commissioner and former chief of defence staff, as the "mother of all garrisons". It follows, therefore, that the JLP should do whatever it can to protect one of its own and no reasonable individual would argue with such a premise.

However, when it is to be recalled that Mr Coke was being sought by the US authorities to face criminal charges in that country, based on the extradition treaty arrangements in existence up till now, for the Government of Jamaica to be in any way involved in preventing this to proceed in the required way would not only smack of being a case of obstruction of justice but must be seen as unethical, corrupt and immoral.

Juxtapose those observations against the backdrop of Mr Golding telling parliamentarians and the country at large that he had sanctioned such an act of interference, and the plot thickens to the point where Jamaica is now looking down the barrel of a smoking gun. The Sunday Gleaner's e-mail revelations (thank God for the Access to Information Act) have put the icing on the cake. The JLP's initial response is to cower in silence and retreat to Belmont Road (the JLP headquarters). Will it surrender to the groundswell of public opinion and demand that heads roll, or will it come out fighting, hoping that this will be yet another nine-day wonder?

Already, there are those who had already begun to crow that Mr Golding has nine lives politically and that he is likely to go down in history as the greatest Comeback Kid of all time. Well, a cat may look at a king. It remains to be seen whether or not Jamaican civil society has the guts to rise up against such acts of infamy and deception, or whether Mr Golding will have the testicular fortitude to do the right thing. As the song says:

"Torn between two lovers, feelin' like a fool

Lovin' both of you is breakin' all the rules."

Will Bruce the statesman (putting country first) rise to the occasion, or will Bruce the politician (putting party first) sink further into the morass of deception and double standards, taking us along with him? The prosecution rests. The verdict is yours.

lloydbsmith@hotmail.com

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