GOLDING… mustn’t resile from what needs to be done.

BYLES… there’s no reason we should be a corner shop.

Dr Raulston Nembhard

Mr Richard Byles is a serious player in the Jamaican private sector. As someone who has accomplished much in the portfolios he has handled, he is not given to cheap talk and his public utterances tend to be measured and very deliberate. In a recent speech at the awards banquet of the Jamaica Institute of Engineers, he made the trenchant remark that Jamaica seems not to have any plans to solve its economic problems. This indeed is not a virgin observation as many analysts in one form or the other have been saying this for some time. It is quite clear that as a society we are just muddling our way through. There is no national vision around which people can organise to pull the country through. There are so many sectional interests that consume the energy of people and force them to be only concerned about the prosperity of their small part of the Jamaican pie.

With all the pretty speeches about patriotism that we get from our national leaders at our Independence or Heroes’ Day celebrations, we know deep down in our hearts that we are not a united nation. We are not imbued with a sense of community and we do not have a visceral sense of what it really means to be our brothers’ or sisters’ keeper. This is one of the reasons that life has become so cheap in Jamaica. There is no moral or metaphysical basis of morality that tells us that life is sacred; that the human being is endowed with inalienable rights which come to us because we are human and which cannot and should not be given by the caprice of human governance.

It is precisely this contempt for the ordinary Jamaican why framers of our constitution could argue that to give the people justiciable rights is to derogate from the sovereignty of Parliament. In other words, our rulers elected by us must have control over our lives but there should be no justiciable recourse, no matter the depredations they visit upon the people. Our problem in Jamaica is not monetary; it is certainly not about the absence of resources. We have been more blessed with national resources than many countries, like Singapore and Barbados, that have done something with what God has blessed them with. Compared with Barbados and Singapore, as Mr Byles characterised it, there is no reason why we should continue to be a corner shop.

Our problems begin and end with how we regard the dignity and humanity of the ordinary Jamaican. This dictates the kind of economy that we want to build, the kind of judiciary that we want to create to protect the inalienable rights of citizens, the kind of security force that will seek to preserve and protect the life and property of the ordinary citizen. It also dictates the kind of religion that can give legitimacy to the sacredness of life and not the impoverishment of the soul.

As Mr Byles rightly acknowledges, all of this calls for the right kind of leadership. In his words and in the words of many, we need leaders who can do what is right and not what is popular. This is where the rub is. As “Mutty” Perkins so often reminds us, part of our problem with leadership in Jamaica (and perhaps in all post-plantation slave societies) is that our leaders are wedded to the paradigm of the plantation system. We need leaders who can begin to think seriously about Jamaica and not party. As I have frequently said, in Jamaica our political parties do not seem to know or if they know, do not wish to acknowledge, where the interests of their parties end and where the interests of Jamaica begin when that party gains political power.

They see access to power as an access to the largesse of the state to be doled out to their political supporters who helped them to power. This speaks to the tribal nature of our political leadership. It is this tribal characteristic of our politics that has spawned the garrison phenomenon with all its horrific manifestations.

One cannot see that there is any anxiety on the part of our political leadership to end this state of affairs. Mr Golding is coming across as the reluctant leader. He articulates the problems of the country very well and what needs to be done to solve them. But somehow there seems to be a reluctance on his part to step to the front and take the obviously harsh and uncompromising decisions that are needed to cauterise them – win, lose or draw; hopefully to win, with the people’s help.

The present crisis presents him with a perfect opportunity to carry out the most radical transformation of the Jamaican society that has ever been afforded any prime minister in Jamaica. He will not get another chance if he misses this one. It is not bad-mindeness to carry out this reform, even if it means cancelling the anachronistic parish council system that has resulted in the over-governance of the people; making redundant a lot of our useless statutory bodies and organisations that were created to give jobs to the boys and girls of the political parties; or carrying out constitutional reform that will make the people truly sovereign and not the Parliament to which we send them.

This is your hour, Mr Golding. You are the man on the bridge. You may become the most unpopular prime minister as the things you have to do will only make you so, but you should not resile from doing what has to be done. If you do it right, history will absolve you. But you have to determine whether it is your own popularity that you are interested in or the long-term health and viability of a nation that is rotting at its core and fast on its way to becoming a pariah nation. Mr Byles is right: we need leaders who will do what is right, even if it makes them unpopular. Take the people into your confidence and level with them. Tell them what you want to do and invite them to support you. They will if they know that you are serious.

stead6655@aol.com

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