TODAY should really be all about the contribution that our heroes, past and present, have made to the success of our beloved country.

Ideally, we should be toasting the great men and women who have sacrificed so much, and celebrating the progress of those in possession of the mantle of leadership.

But, unfortunately, such sentiments have need to be tempered with what for us is a very sad reality.

We are talking about Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s latest political manoeuvre, which in our view has put him on par with the hapless ‘waiverer’ in the biblical book of James.

It’s not that his 11th-hour decision to authorise a Commission of Enquiry into the scandal that still is Mr Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke and the Manatt, Phelps & Phillips affair is wrong per se. But once again his timing — true to the pattern that has evolved since this unfortunate saga began last year — is off and smacks of insincerity.

And we are forced, as a responsible newspaper, to ask: Why now?

Could it have anything to do with the defamation suit filed by Mr Harold Brady, the attorney-at-law who, according to Mr Golding’s allegations, is responsible for the rough ride that the country has been subjected to over the past year?

Could it have anything to do with the need to dispel the stubborn public perception of what too many Jamaicans believe to be downright corruption within his administration?

Let’s face it.

The pictures of his administration that have emerged in recent months are, to put it delicately, putrid, notwithstanding the successes that have been attributed to the Jamaica Debt Exchange programme, the divestment of Air Jamaica and the Sugar Company of Jamaica and the State of Emergency occasioned, ironically, by the explosion of the “Dudus” scandal.

And it has become increasingly hard for the public to swallow the stark contradictions of the messages that urge poor people to hold strain and tighten their belts.

The truth is that a Commission of Enquiry into the Manatt, Phelps & Phillips affair at this point may well be illustrative of the maxim ‘too little, too late’.

For it has become painfully obvious that any attempt to cover up the truth now is not only vain, but foolish.

As things stand presently, the duppies of ‘Dudusgate’ are pounding on the closet doors of Mr Golding’s administration. Far better to lose them now while some modicum of dignity remains, than risk the inevitable embarrassment of a startling ‘boo’.

We are obviously very disappointed by the Dudus-related events because we, like the rest of the nation, had been so hopeful that in the new leadership would come a clean spirit conducive to building a clean country.

That indeed would have given us something expansive on which to celebrate Jamaican heroism in a time when heroes are few.