IF the truth be told, many Jamaicans at home and abroad, especially those of the post-Independence generation, are of the view that Independence, as we have come to know it, is not a guaranteed route to a blissful future for the mass of the population, despite the overwhelming evidence of vigorous and assertive thrust into political self-management since the lowering of the Union Jack of Mother Britain on 6th August, 1962.

They blame the struggles with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since the 1970s, the stress with our debt, high prices, crime and violence, the rapid decline in the standards of morality, increasing immiseration, and more on what the late Wilmot “Motty” Perkins once referred to as “the folly of freedom” hankered after by misguided souls who were hardly fit to govern, much less rule.

Of course, blaming the country’s loss of prosperity on the advent of Independence is clearly disingenuous and confuses sequence with consequence. But, on the other hand, there is no denying that present objective conditions suggest that Jamaica, at 52, is as much an object of pathology as it is a cause for giving much thanks and praise.

At the root of this problematique confronting contemporary post-colonial Jamaican life is the persistent issue of empowerment. We are still a far way from being able to answer definitively the questions: What kind of society do we want for ourselves? Whose Jamaica is an independent Jamaica intended to be? And, who really wields power in Jamaica?

The past 52 years have not answered any of these questions to everyone’s satisfaction. And, to make matters worse, our National Motto, “Out of Many, One People”, has served to obscure rather than illuminate the path to national consensus for which our governors and leaders so often appeal.

And yet, unless the mass of the population is made to feel that the society can function in their interest, a tolerable and sane future for Jamaica is doubtful. This, furthermore, is why taking the general populace far more seriously than they have been taken for a good part of the past five decades of Independence now forcefully suggests itself in the foreseeable future.

It’s not that there have been no genuine attempts at this. Our past and present history is littered with examples of genuine attempts at a number of devices to achieving a sense of nationalism, participation, and patriotism.

The encouragement of a broad-based corporate power structure to accommodate the Jamaicans who have evolved out of the events of 1938 would include:

* the facilitating of voluntary organisations to buttress grass roots and community development;

* worker participation from shop floor level to the boardroom;

* the expansion of educational opportunities to accommodate greater numbers of people from poor backgrounds;

* greater access afforded to multiple thousands of Jamaicans to landownership and land use in ways that could improve their economic conditions;

* models in praxis of participatory democracy;

* modernisation of the structures governing the electoral process;

* wide-scale access to the media for all citizens to freely air their concerns and comment on public acts of commission and omission; and

* legislation to protect the interests of our children and the vulnerable, safeguard the integrity of the public sector and stem corruption.

Such is the list of that which emerges from the past 52 years of political self-management.

But, in spite of this, nothing in the above list of accomplishments has yet succeeded to our people’s satisfaction. Why?

One of the issues worth considering is that, while willing to pay due respect to the ancestral marvels of ages, a younger generation of Jamaicans — whose sensibilities are largely defined by the powerful forces of cultural transmissions via satellite and digital technology transferred from the metropolitan North — are equally eager and resolute to have their elders know that smartphones and other sophisticated digital communication devices; wet, liquor-branding, and fashion parties; binge drinking; fast food; rap music; and other imports from the North are also now part and parcel of Jamaican “culture”.

This clash of cultures naturally leads to a divergence in outlook between our policy ‘determiners’ and the people. But, unless there is willingness on the part of all of us to grow with the time and creatively in the process, we will be in for far greater assertions of discord as a society.

In any event, without a clear native vision and a set of ideas linked to some very specific objectives that go beyond balancing the budget or winning an election after a five-year incumbency — important though these are to the safeguarding of our democracy — we will forever be hijacking other people’s ideas, realities and experiences. This will guarantee to the society in the next 50 years the status of minstrel and an aggregation of insecure men and women still groping in the dark in the quest for meaning and relevance.

In this regard, Vision 2030, like other national plans before it, though loaded with good objectives, is threatened with irrelevance because it lacks the support and understanding of the mass of the population. The responsibility to prevent this happening, however, is not the challenge of the Government alone. Beside the politicians and their public sector support staff must now stand the rest of the society — including the private sector — in the quest for thought, innovation, creativity, vision, determination, faith, along with painstaking and sustained application.

The next 50 years of our Independence must see us tackling head-on, as a united country, the issue of the appropriate mechanisms that will be needed to mobilise the human capital around to greater productivity for home consumption and for export.

We must unite in establishing the institutional and operational frameworks needed for facilitating innovation in agriculture; the supply of food; in the conservation of energy; in the elimination of waste in the public administration and private sector management; in the delivery of modern primary health care; in the optimum utilisation of the skills of women other than as child-bearers; in the strengthening of trading relations with Caricom, Latin America, the Far East and Europe; and in the supply of appropriate education and training for economic development as well as for the enrichment of the quality of individual and collective lives.

In the final analysis, nothing is likely to succeed in the future in this country

without increasing awareness, especially among public planners and decision-takers, of the need for cultural realities to be allowed free rein.

For too long the creative imagination and intellect of the people have suffered the scourge of marginalisation from the mainstream. The next 50 years must see a reversal of this trend if “the system” is to endure.

The genius of statecraft, of nation-building, and of social transformation will be vindicated only when Jamaicans come to feel that “the system” is of their making. This is going to be the biggest task for our politicians, educators, entrepreneurs, religious leaders, and artists in the years to come. Because if things remain as they have been these past 52 years, then we can expect the United States, Canada and Great Britain to continue claiming the fascination and loyalties of our younger generation who will continue to get themselves educated here only to live elsewhere.

In such circumstance, no amount of exhortation from our leaders about patriotism for the land of their birth will be heeded, much less understood.

The sad reality is that, with all the achievements of the past 52 years and the back-breaking work of founding fathers Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley, the society is yet to work for the majority who are called upon to toil for it.

Hence, if the nationalism of old is dead, then new ways of firing the imagination of the young generation towards commitment, hard work, and dedicated service must be high on the agenda. Issues affecting human rights, the environment, climate change, and other such contemporary concerns, must all be part of this mix. For it is unrealistic to expect positive response from people who are not regarded to be the creators of their own destiny.

If our citizens are to be made to feel that they can relate as resourceful contributors and as creative beings in the shaping of this society, then the best gift our leaders can give to them in the next 50 years is radical hope — even in the face of the stern logic of austerity.

Are we up to the task?