Dear Editor,

Last Thursday, former PM Edward Seaga, on the TVJ show Impact was at pains to describe the genesis and evolution of the community of Tivoli Gardens.

It is my opinion that this Tivoli Gardens was a social experiment that Mr Seaga undertook which has failed miserably. He said he built it and put in the relevant social and cultural structures around which the community was to flourish.

He housed the people, he built schools, etc and nurtured them and loved and cared for them. He cited with great pride the successes of the football team and the dance troupe. I submit that this model was a wrong premise on which to build a community. This model has served to legitimise and entrench a culture of patronage, where the development and progress of a people are dependent on the largesse and benevolence of someone other than themselves.

Mr Seaga thought he was doing the people a favour, but what he was in fact doing was setting himself up as benefactor and creating a scenario where the people took no ownership for something that they had created, but would rather forever more, be beholden to whoever was the benefactor of the moment. So when Mr Seaga left the picture, and Mr Golding no longer “nurtured and loved and cared for” the people of Tivoli Gardens, space was created for someone else, perhaps with less noble motives than Mr Seaga, to look after and, by extension, control the people.

And so it is, that today, we have citizens of this country who have been through some awful experiences — losing family members at the hand of the State and feeling compelled to conform to behaviours such as shielding known criminals, looking on as their sons and daughters are corrupted and violated by ignoble benefactors/community leaders.

How horrible to feel ostracised by the society at large, to feel as if the State is against you and to feel as if your well-being and that of your family is dependent on another human being.

Because of the genesis of this community and the unsustainability of its underpinnings, members of Tivoli Gardens will now have to make some tough life decisions for themselves. Some will have to begin the difficult and scary task of uprooting to a new, less encumbered setting. Some will have to defy community leaders in exercising their own free will, risking their very lives and the lives of their famlies.

All of this could have been avoided if our leaders had sought to create the environment where people could work and prosper using their own natural talents and abilities, rather than handing what should have been the natural fruits of their labour to them on a platter. If people could work and build their own communities, I submit that the various cultural and sporting achievements would also have occurred. Perhaps, in addition to dancers and footballers, Tivoli Gardens could equally boast about computer programmers, doctors, lawyers and businessmen and women.

This is a very painful and difficult place that the people of Tivoli Gardens and all Jamaicans find ourselves in.

The culture of patronage must end now.

Kelly McIntosh

kkmac218@gmail.com