Mark Wignall

For the sake of this column I will call my friend Mr Brown. He is a veteran of politics and MP for a rural, hilly constituency.

Like most MPs, a day spent in his constituency is a nightmare of handouts in the form of money for school fees, books, medical assistance, pesticides, roof repairs and every other imaginable problem. This time around he was not prepared for the request.

He was not yet one hour into his weekly visit, had not reached his constituency office, but still his pocket was $2,500 lighter. How does one reject an old woman who tells you she has the money for her diabetes medication but is short of the taxi fare to collect it? Is it possible to ignore a young, bright-looking face whose owner has been unemployed since leaving school but now has an interview lined up and is short of the transport fare to reach the office?
When one stands in the middle of a 75-year-old farmer's one room, gazes upward and glimpses the sky, one cannot refuse his request for two sheets of zinc roofing. And the list goes on. But the surprise.

As the SUV rounded a corner, Mr Brown sensed a rush of movement to his right. Entering a straight stretch of roadway, he saw a man in his field with a farm fork in one hand. The farmer waved to him frantically, dropped the fork, then without once taking his eyes off the MP, broke out into a near sprint in his heavy water-boots.

Mr Brown slowed the vehicle and stopped as the man who was in his late 50s approached the politician. "Is w'appen now?" the MP asked him.

"Mr Brown, from long time a want ask yu but a never get around to it," the man said. The MP braced for the request. Was it cash money, a bag of fertiliser, lunch money for his grandchild? Not this time.

The man leaned on the door of the SUV on the passenger side. "Mr Brown, mi have a problem and mi a beg yu fi help mi. Mr Brown, yu can find a woman fi mi, sah?"

I never did quiz my friend to determine if the request was met. In the laughter which followed, I totally forgot.

Information coming out of the disaster in New Orleans and surrounding areas indicate that in a world of plenty, the uneducated, the unskilled and the unprepared get nothing but poverty. Here in Jamaica, we have a well-known and oft-repeated saying, "Nutten nah gwaan". Nine out of 10 times it means that there is no job, no money, no joy.

But the real meaning behind the meaning is, I no longer have the energy to seek a job, I am not in support of the work ethic expected, and I am the real victim in this thing. Again, behind that meaning also is the fact that the person is uneducated, unskilled and unprepared for existence in a world where work equals money equals a better standard of living.

If a man sets up a shanty in an open land in the heart of the very affluent Cherry Gardens and that man had, many years ago, left high school illiterate, at some stage it must dawn on him that he is not going to get a job doing brain surgery. He may find that in Cherry Gardens, he cannot even get a job to clean up an outside bathroom because in the new world which passed him while he was asleep at school, there are companies in the business of mowing lawns and cleaning up outside bathrooms.

An important question to be asked is this. If successive political administrations have over the years so fostered a social and economic disaster that close to 80 per cent of people 15 years and over in Jamaica have never passed a single exam, should not these administrations provide work for the population fitting the academic and non-skilled qualification?

If the answer is yes, it would be an admission of political failure, but it would also mean that we would be preparing our country to be the region's basket case. Come to Jamaica if you want to find the best gardeners! Come to Jamaica if you want the best pit cleaners! Come to Jamaica where we have the best of those most suited to sweep garbage on the streets!

The other advertising cry would be: If you want architects, medical technicians, a vast army of maths teachers, skilled managers, civil engineers and urban planners. go to some other country, don't come to Jamaica! That is our most grievous shame. We do not educate our children, therefore we cannot produce sufficient numbers of skilled people to move the country forward.

It is, I know, unfair to expect the uneducated, unskilled and socially outcast population to accept the overall objective of nation building. He wants his now and he doesn't want to hear rubbish about "nation building". He wants money in his pocket!

At the same time, if all we have been producing are the same set of politics designed to stuff bellies and stunt brain power, then what our politicians will always bawl for is more SESP, five per cent of budget allocated for MPs to "spend" in their constituencies and other pork-barrel policies.

If we assume that the objectives of our politics and politicians is the development of our country and the pursuit of happiness for its people, then a problem is automatically generated in managing the transition from pork politics to developmental politics if that is where we want to go. I believe that we are now at that stage where our politicians are struggling to come to grips with how fast the country moves to the developmental side. The problem is, there is always an election on the horizon and for that, a little pork is always needed.

It has long been established that Jamaicans have champagne appetites and rum pockets. We don't mind the NHT house but we want the big-screen TV too, the flip phone costing $20,000, the $1-million deportee, the 5,000-watt music centre, "nuff" sessions and niceness. Nowhere in this is an appreciation that $4,000 per week cannot pay for those.
Outside of the early 1970s, governments in this country have never led a revolution in education to the extent that it becomes the first plank of each administration's business.
Governments are afraid to do this because you cannot preach education to hungry people. Instead, preaching pork to them rings a bell and gets them out on election day.

Jamaicans want pork, pork and more pork. After all, education can't "full belly".

observemark@yahoo.com

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