‘Tis a shame that the article which recently appeared in The Economist magazine titled “Unfixable” did not have the name of the author, or authors. For while it might be hard for one to get a byline in that esteemed publication, I think that any writer or writing team that can, in 800 well-chosen words, plunge a reading public into the depths of depression and despair over thestate of affairs in their country, should at least have their names and picture/s attached to the article.

Lord knows, we’d like to buck these guys up somewhere (here) and ask them to go pick out their own tamarind switch. (Since they know so much about us, they probably know what tamarind-switch-picking is all about.)

The article is a wake-up call, no doubt, and a bitter pill to swallow. And it makes us feel especially bad because we’ve heard the alarm bells for a long time, but we persist in covering our ears and eyes with pillows.

The prime minister knows it too. He has known it for a long time, and spoke passionately about it at the JLP Annual Conference exactly three years ago when he said: “We are where we are and we are what we are because, as a country, we have made too many mistakes, taken too many wrong turns, missed too many opportunities and wasted too much time.

“The Jamaican people are tired and fed up,” he said, “so much so that many of them have given up hope. They have abandoned their dream of a better life and they live from day to day because the challenges of each day are as much as they can handle. They have lost faith not just in the government, but in the system of government and the institutions of government. We have to restore their hope! We have to rebuild their faith. We have to recapture their trust!”

That was three years ago, and even after having narrowly won the elections of 2007, we are no better off today than when he described us then as a “people living in poverty and squalor. Our young people robbed of their potential. So many men and women with children to raise waking up every morning with no job to go and without a decent roof over their heads. So many people crying out for justice, abused and brutalised by the State. So cruel to each other, slaughtering even our women and children.”

Not much has changed since that impassioned promise three years ago to “turn this country around; afford our people a better life; and lead Jamaica through that struggle”. And so the prime minister’s task at the Jamaica Labour Party’s annual conference (today) at the National Arena is an awesome one: for he must convince the party faithful and the nation, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that his plan for Jamaica’s recovery is, on some level, working and that we are not at all “unfixable”.

And the prime minister should be careful not to utter again any words which put the blame for our current economic crises squarely on the shoulders of the previous government. We don’t want to hear what we inherited from the previous government in the way of a huge national debt, punishing interest rates on borrowed money, mismanagement and poorly negotiated contracts.

Furthermore, only six per cent of us believe this and blame the PNP, Mr Golding. According to the latest poll, a hefty 51 per cent blame the Government (32 per cent) or Golding (19 per cent) and only 13 per cent blame the world economic crisis. To do so only allows us to go with the flow and wallow in the complacency that the mess we’re in is someone else’s fault. To use the prime minister’s own words: “We fool ourselves when we seek to blame others, to blame it on our past. We have no one to blame but ourselves.”

So, we’ll be listening carefully to the prime minister’s address to this year’s conference, and we want no sweet talk and no repeat of the rhetoric of 2006. We believed you when you said, Mr Prime Minister, that “I am no messiah. I can work no miracles. I say to the Jamaican people – in the difficult journey that we must undertake I can only offer leadership. Paul Bogle didn’t carry the people from Stony Gut to Spanish Town; he led them. Martin Luther King didn’t carry the people from Selma to Montgomery; he led them. I, too, will lead.”scowicomm@gmail.com

We are a mighty race – just look at our accomplishments. We need an awesome leader, Mr Golding. We want what you promised us.