“WE need to be more believing of our political leaders, whoever they are.” That’s the view of Dennis O’Brien, chairman of Digicel, the Irish-owned telecommunications company that has been eating Cable and Wireless’s lunch all over the Caribbean for the past decade.

He was responding to a question from Milton Samuda, president of the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce and facilitator of a conversation with the Digicel chairman, at a workshop titled Secrets to Business Success, held at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel last Tuesday. Samuda wanted to know what this very successful entrepreneur regarded as the one thing most needed for Jamaica to achieve the levels of human and economic development consistent with our capacity and our promise.

Mr O’Brien believes that Jamaica “is at the cusp of a very transformative moment” but we all need to believe it for the transformation to take place. Also, Jamaican businessmen and women should have the “same self-belief” as our athletes who repeatedly conquer the world.

The event, sponsored by the EXIM Bank of Jamaica with support from the Bankers’ Association of Jamaica and the Mona School of Business (where I am an associate teaching fellow), brought together several successful business people to share their own success stories and strategies with other entrepreneurs looking for strategies to launch or build businesses.

As the Digicel chairman spoke I closely observed Audley Shaw, the minister of finance and planning, at a nearby table nodding vigorous agreement. No doubt the minister’s enthusiasm could be explained, at least in part, by the fact that earlier he had expressed his own conviction that “this moment in Jamaica is a defining moment for all of us”.

Following on the agreement with the IMF, the minister said, an enabling macro-economic framework was now in place; foreign exchange reserves stand at over US$3 billion; and he has secured loans in excess of US$3 billion from multilateral lending agencies. “The economy is now poised for growth,” he said, adding that the climate was now “favourable for risk-taking and entrepreneurial activity”.

The minister made no attempt to conceal his delight that he had just secured a loan of US$400 million at 7.95 per cent interest to replace a 2001 loan which attracted 11.25 per cent. And well he might, even if the celebration had to be tempered by the release from the IMF revealing the Fund’s disquiet about the Government not doing enough to rein in expenditure and some key targets are under threat.

But back to Mr O’Brien’s provocative observation: first, I think he’s right. We do not believe our leaders.

Low levels of trust in institutions

A publication by the Centre for Leadership and Governance at UWI, Mona, titled Probing Jamaica’s Political Culture, provided data showing that a very high 83.5 per cent of Jamaicans believe most people cannot be trusted to keep their promise; and an even higher 84.8 per cent believe the Government cannot be trusted to keep their promise. We neither trust each other nor our Government.

Further, large majorities of Jamaicans have low levels of trust in many institutions including trade unions, the private sector, the Government, political parties, the judiciary, Parliament, the police, political parties and local government councils, according to the survey data.

Where people have low levels of trust in institutions it is usually because they do not work well or do not deliver what the people expect. I believe both things are at work in Jamaica.

So, at issue is: why is there such little trust and what can be done, by leaders and followers alike, to change the equation? Some might pose the question another way: Is it that the people are ‘not believing of their leaders’, or is it that the leaders have not done enough to warrant the people believing what they say or that they will actually do what they say?

While distrust is widespread, it must be acknowledged that the political system has worked to the extent that we freely change governments and the losers accept defeat, even if they are a little grumpy at first; our leaders do not routinely loot the treasury; and we have some respected public institutions that act as a counter-weight to political administrations.

Just two examples: the Electoral Commission, comprised of representatives of both major parties and a majority of independent members, has succeeded in cleaning up the worst features of our voting arrangements and the system is now respected outside Jamaica. Contractor General Greg Christie has been unrelenting in his drive to minimise corruption in the award of government contracts and the sale of public assets.

But at the level of representative politics we have an extraordinary level of partisan divisiveness that goes way beyond the expected cut and thrust of political competition.

We saw it on display last week in the House when debate on a motion to postpone local government elections descended into obscene name-calling and imputing unsavoury motives for what may very well be nothing more than honest disagreement.

Perhaps the extreme manifestation of the political divide is the garrison phenomenon where the party in control of such a community or constituency has a near-monopoly on power. The garrisons get community support because, historically, they deliver tangible economic benefits like free housing, light, water, cable TV. Public and private companies that provide these services can neither collect nor disconnect.

Outside the garrison communities, professionals and businesses benefit from having a particular party in power; the state funds a majority of the contracts in Jamaica so we will support our side regardless of what they do or say as long as we think we can benefit. It’s an attitude that sustains, even justifies, victimisation on political grounds.

Low levels of accountability

One negative consequence of extreme partisanship is that we have great difficulty holding leaders accountable for their conduct of public affairs.

Leaders can usually count on loyalists to support them in whatever they do. On the other side of the same coin we have difficulty recognising the contribution of people ‘on the other side’, except in the outpouring of pious emptiness when they die.

Another negative consequence is difficulty in building national consensus around critical issues such as fixing the education system, investing in our young people, organising an economy on a basis that can create good jobs, defeating (or substantially degrading) organised crime, dismantling political garrisons, and allocating public resources on an equitable basis.

The ongoing enquiry into the hiring of the US law firm Manatt, Phelps and Phillips to lobby the US administration to ease off on its request for the extradition of Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke is an excellent platform to explore the question of accountability of our leaders.

Last November, a Don Anderson-CVM poll found that 67 per cent of Jamaicans held Prime Minister Bruce Golding responsible for the Manatt mess after he revealed that he had personally sanctioned something on which he had earlier misled Parliament and the country.

Will the enquiry deal with the issues of trust, accountability and truth or descend into a political stalemate? If it is the latter, it will not take us to that good place where we can become more believing in our leaders.

kcr@cwjamaica.com