AS I write this (Thursday, June 7) it is still one full day before the sentencing of confessed gangster, Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke.

Just as how some of us in the media speculated in the 1990s and 2000s about the extent, the reach and the ferocity of his power inside Tivoli Gardens, we can do little more than speculate whether the judge will give him the maximum sentence of 23 years or a part of it.

There is a belief locally that if he co-operates with the US authorities, that is, relate to them in detail who were his top lieutenants and his facilitators in the police force and politics, a significantly lesser sentence will be handed out. That view seems not to have factored in the many hours of taped telephone conversations that the Americans must have secured during the period of investigations.

To my way of seeing it, if the Americans have him and other VIPs on recorded conversations, it would immediately kick away any bargaining leg that he would have liked to have in such a situation. Second, Jamaica can be a vile place to live and Dudus would have been forced to give much thought to the relatives whom he left behind at home. I am certain that some politician or other official would be banking on him acquiring that frame of mind.

If he is given the maximum sentence, to me, it would not automatically mean that he didn’t call names. I say this because all sorts of deals outside of the glare of the public and the courts could have been struck to make his life in prison ‘more betta’ in the Jamaican parlance.

I have seen enough in this world to be highly suspicious of official trials before the courts and what they hope to convey to a gullible public. Deals can be cut while public statements say something else. Laws are written on paper, but behind closed doors blind and impartial justice is usually suspended and sometimes when the parties emerge to return to the glare of a public trial, the deck had been long set and everything else played out for and bought hook, line and sinker by the public is unadulterated farce.

It is said that nature abhors a vacuum. In other words, the whooshing sound made as Dudus was airlifted out of Jamaica will in time be answered by a similar sound in the opposite direction.

Tivoli Gardens will not suddenly attain ‘developed’ status with 90 per cent employment. Young boys there will not immediately find God and church and resist the urge to handle an ‘Israeli’ (Uzi), or a MAC-10. There will be no grand education blitz there, nor will the thirst for knowledge, a better way and a brighter tomorrow fall on them by next weekend.

Their political leaders will be the same tired old bunch preaching division just like the rest of them in the other 62 constituencies. And no one there or on the periphery of the need for a new understanding will dare ask, how did it get to this, will it get worse and more importantly, what can we all do to ensure that such organised criminality never return to Tivoli and hundreds of other poor inner city communities throughout Jamaica?

Budget exercise is politics over economics

FIRST were the mad PNP promises made last year while both parties were out campaigning.

The JLP spoke of stability but said that tough times were ahead. The PNP said that if it was given power, ‘nice times’ would return.

Something called the Progressive Agenda was put together by men who actually believed in a PNP and a leadership that had long expired. No one spoke of it on the campaign trail. Too much for the people they wanted to catch in their nets.

The PNP promised to remove GCT from JPS bills. First Finance Minister Peter Phillips was given the thankless task of announcing the increases. Everything was taxed, a proposition that I would have no problem with if the GCT rate was considerably lowered.

For sure, the problem with lowering the GCT rate to say 10 per cent is that there can be no guarantees that the consuming public will spend more per household to make up for the fallout. Once the stuff comes out of the horse’s backend, if it doesn’t work, there is no way in which one can get it back inside the horse. So, that was always risky.

Phillips played with us, the fools. Increase the GCT threshold to 300 kWh per month then add more than 50 per cent to the previous GCT rate of 10 per cent. Tax textbooks, meats except chicken and just in case the chicken farmer believes he is off the hook, catch the wretch by taxing animal feed.

Sanitary napkins were spared. Not so ‘dutty gal’ and saltfish.

Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller then comes and voila! GCT from householders’ JPS bills disappears. The tax on textbooks remains.

In round three of the circus act, Peter returns and, magic again, the tax on textbooks disappears.

At which stage of the entire Budget exercise did the planners/politicians put the nation’s interests first and make the decision to leave their bloated egos outside the door?

It was all designed to burnish the egos of politicians, not to further the interest of the country. But then again, as long as politicians have a guaranteed cheering gallery, to hell with the people.

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