Dear Editor,

Jamaicans have lived through the Iran sugar deal, the Shell waiver scandal, the fat cats salary scandal, National Housing Development scandal, Sandals Whitehouse scandal, the Cuban light bulb scandal, Trafigura scandal, the furniture scandal, zinc scandal, the Manatt, Phelps and Phillips scandal (extradition of Christopher “Dudus” Coke”, which cost over 70 lives), and now the Outameni scandal. Maybe I have missed a few, but please tell me how many politicians have been punished because of any of these scandals. None!

A few months ago former Prime Minister P J Patterson was asking Jamaicans to “show appreciation for politicians while they are alive”, but, in all sincerity, how can we? That would be like Jews thanking Hitler

for the holocaust. These decisions may be clothed in legality, but certainly they are naked in morality.

These scandals are among the main reasons that the Minister of Finance Dr Peter Phillips doesn’t wish to see another finance minister go through the humiliation he had to suffer in negotiating the latest International Monetary Fund (IMF) deal.

When are we going to learn that unless we send people to prison for making corrupt decisions, then we will forever be a struggling country. And, Ralston Hyman recently said that Jamaica, of all the countries in the entire world, has the dubious distinction of having the longest borrowing relationship with the IMF.

There is no way that we can continue to move from scandal to scandal. We owe it to the next generation to remove this cruel burden and not let them move from IMF deal to IMF deal. We owe them a better future.

The IMF chief in Jamaica, Dr Jan Kees Martijn, has told us bluntly that the IMF will not micromanage Jamaica’s problems, before he said that crime isn’t an IMF conditionality. Therefore, we can continue to murder each other and believe that the IMF cares. We can continue to waste public resources and hope that the IMF will stop us. They won’t. Our future is in our hands; we can close our hand crushing it to death or we can release it and let it soar.

We will have to make this resolve that this will be the last scandal that will absolve any politician of full responsibility and in which none goes to prison.

Mark Clarke

Siloah, St Elizabeth

mark_clarke9@yahoo.com