I am convinced more than ever that Prime Minister Bruce Golding did indeed arrange to set the deck and did so in the recent vote in the House on extending the State of Emergency.

In principle I support a State of Emergency when the nation’s security is under threat. By this reasoning we should have imposed one from 2005 when Jamaica became the murder capital of the world.

The negatives of a State of Emergency always include the treatment meted out to young men from inner-city communities. The police automatically think that everyone they detain is a potential criminal. The dilemma is that the vast majority of the detainees know who the real criminals are and are sometimes deeply involved in criminality.

Our security forces have spent so many years kicking down poor people’s doors and assaulting them that many of our policemen have lost the art of good detective work. During the early days of the recent State of Emergency , many of those men who were summoned and gave up themselves to the police were deeply connected to criminal organisations.

But what did the police hope to achieve by their actions with no supporting intelligence? Were they planning to beat the truth out of them? Or were they hoping that the man would find God and confess?

If there was any positive in this it was the fact that significant parts of the head of criminal organisations were cut off (for a time) and hence, there was a lull in gun crimes.

Golding’s recent statement that he did not wish to defy Parliament by going for another State of Emergency tells me that he went to Parliament seeking an extension but had set the deck to allow the PNP to fall into his trap. And it did.

I still believe that the JCF needs time to update its criminal database. The force is short of about 3,000 men/women, and operating as it does with little financial resources, the State of Emergency was the breath of air it needed.

But now that Golding has scored politically, what happens next if the guns really start to bark again as has been signalled?

Was there a hidden hand at work in Golding’s decision to trap the hapless, leaderless PNP? We are in the hurricane season and the country needs all the cash it can get its hands on. We need every tourist dollar — what we didn’t need was the possible upgrade of another US travel advisory.

It is likely that Golding needed to clear his head politically for more extradition thunderstorms to come.

Emancipate or Extradite?

In the run-up to the extradition of “Dudus” and in the years before when ‘big men’ in politics or in business would pay him homage, it was said that the rule of ‘the president’ guaranteed the residents of Tivoli Gardens peace in their sleep and security by day.

If a woman and her child can leave their home for work and school, respectively, and they do so with the certain knowledge that their house and possessions will be intact when they return, the first part of their emancipation will have been satisfied. After all, they were not freed from chattel slavery only to face the wrath of modern-day gunmen and their marauding followers. The fact is that large populations of the poorest among us were the first that the gunmen would prey upon because that is what the poor, the ignorant and the armed do: prey upon their own first.

“Dudus” was able to redirect this predation away from Tivoli and satisfy the most basic need after food, shelter and clothing — security. However, with him providing lunch money for schoolchildren, shoes for the elderly, a regular pot on weekdays and cash money on Fridays for able-bodied young men who should be in trade-training centres instead of on ‘armed standby’, he led them right back into the arms of a new ‘bucky massa’ — himself.

Why were places like Tivoli Gardens given free rein to build its own governmental structure? In answering that question, the first thing that would come to mind is that any state apparatus which had the painful opportunity to look at these inner-city pockets would have seen 70 per cent unemployment, high teen pregnancy rates, infrastructure in shambles, young men with limited skills and no work ethic.

The state would have known, painfully again, that it was its own abuse (suck out di vote) and neglect which created the conditions. In pondering the huge outlays of funds to restructure and retrain at the expense of the rest of the society, the state would have been stopped in its tracks and forced to make political promises at those times close to elections. Of course, none of those promises could ever be met, and why should they if the vote was always guaranteed?

But there was a saviour. In the 1990s three underworld figures were the triumvirate which controlled the bulk of cocaine being transshipped through Jamaica, from South America on to the Bahamas, then on to the ultimate destination: the great USA. One of those underworld denizens is in jail in America, one is imprisoned in Jamaica and the other who was an illiterate was shot years ago in the company of a few of his friends who were also killed. The killing of that man (and his cronies) was arranged by another underworld figure who is now living in the USA and has recently been having many conversations with US law enforcement authorities.

The common thread which stitched these men’s lives together was their closeness to inner-city garrisons and their penchant for fancy houses on the hills.

But back to what the state saw as its saving grace. These men, two of whom had more than notional attachments to the PNP while the other was a JLP don, even though they owned and lived in their castles in the skies, all needed to maintain their garrison attachments because it was from there that their armies were recruited. As example, the one now living in the USA, still a free man but at the mercy of the US authorities, once invited me to lunch at his command centre.

As we turned a corner there were about eight young men, all with scarves of a certain colour tied around their heads. All had plates piled high with ‘rich food’. He introduced them to me. “These are my soldiers.”

A few of them grunted as I said, ‘How are you, gentlemen?’ None was older than, say, 25, but all had the look of death in their eyes.

The state looked on and knew the arrangements between these ‘dons’ which were really the cream of inner-city criminality. A mixture of fear and patronage ruled, and the state was able to convince itself that too many guns in the hands of too many young men guided by criminal lust, guided by a criminal don and supported by a community of shackled poor people with no prospects of employment were just too much for its plate.

As a result the state gave up these communities to the continuation of the rot and by their actions became a causal factor in the propagation of organised crime. In time as the power of the criminal don increased through extortion, drug running and mercenaries for hire, not only did the state continue to turn a blind eye, but parts of it teamed up with the criminals, as power always seeks out other pockets of power.

Places like Tivoli Gardens became criminal enclaves with the full collusion and knowledge of the state. From Eddie Seaga to PJ Patterson, to Portia Simpson Miller to Bruce Golding, none of them acted positively to end the infernal arrangements until the Americans stepped in, and the US was simply trying to clean up a mess that had been left in its backyard.

If Tivoli’s first shot at emancipation was through extradition, what happens next? At some stage the security forces will have to leave and the young men and their guns will return. And the old arrangements will be fresh in their memories.

Some churchmen should never preach emancipation

“A society is not truly emancipated if it has to resort to a State of Emergency, because with God as the Master there would be freedom from crime and violence because there would be enough fear in your heart for God,” said Abu Ibrahiim of the Montego Bay Masjiid recently.

He ratcheted up his religious nonsense by stating, “We are not emancipated. The only way we will be truly emancipated is when we turn back to our Creator, He is our only slave master and the only one who deserves to be given worship and to be respected. Once we turn to Him and do all of these things then therefore we will have freedom.”

One assumes that ‘God as Master’ means to Abu Ibrahim him as intercessor. Man and woman, freed from the physical shackles of those who had brutally kidnapped Africans and taken them to the ‘New World’, including Jamaica, must therefore free their minds from their mental enslavement to things white, I assume, and instead latch on to God, Ibrahim’s God. Go to Ibrahim’s church because Abu Ibrahim knows that man cannot exist without a slave master.

Is this a joke? Listen, there is no doubt that as a nation we have messed up big time, especially since gaining our political independence in August 1962. Economically we lag behind most of the countries in the Latin American and Caribbean region. In the longest reign of any administration in Jamaica (the PNP from 1989 to 2007) as against what we possessed in terms of our infrastructure, the worst economic performance in the region was recorded.

Where our political leaders failed us, especially when Michael Manley, who promised so much, wanted to lead us to socialist heaven and our political tribalism pitted PNP against JLP in gun warfare, one against the other, some of our churchmen were no less culpable, preaching a doctrine which had, as it genesis and its end, their own eagerness to be our masters.

According to a backward thinker like Ibrahim, what is needed is a new slave master, not new leadership. His faith (Muslim) is, like Christianity, no stranger to slavery, and Abu Ibrahim must be quite familiar with the history of the Arabs in the Atlantic slave trade.

That history is indelibly stained with the collusion of black Africans with the Arabs in selling slaves to the Europeans – too much so for a misguided churchman like Ibrahim to be telling us about God as slave master.

Pastor Charles Brevitt of the West Jamaica Conference was a much more emancipated man with an independent mind. I fully support his position when he said, “I really don’t think we are truly emancipated. I think that intellectually we are still enslaved. You are hard-pressed, even among our learned people, to find independent thinkers and consequently, ‘waggonists’ are a dime a dozen. People jump to support individuals who promise them betterment on a platter, whether in the church, in community or in employing organisations. People are easily excited by promises of betterment on a platter and that is one of the reasons why con men and scam artistes succeed so readily. People don’t realise if it is too good to be true, it maybe is not true. And so we have a long way to go. True emancipation can only come when each man sees his inherent worth; realises that indigenous is as good as imported; and that the nation’s destiny is but one block at a time with each citizen’s contribution. Then we wouldn’t need the politicians, the State of Emergency or foreign aid. All the raw materials we need are resident in our minds and in our energies, in our creativity and in our coming together as one people.”

There was a saying among progressive people who were close to the streets in the 1970s. It came out of the USA but we’ve used it here. To the pastor I say, “Right on, Pastor Brevitt.”

To Abu Ibrahim I say, go back to the drawing board, go back to a new theology that liberates your people and frees your women from the shackles of a far-off past.

We do not need any new slave master, be he God or man. The place is filled with too many of them now. Unable to provide effective leadership, churchmen like Ibrahim can only see into the disgraced past of their archaic religious faith.

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