Dear Editor:

Photographs of a Jamaican member of Parliament, a prime minister even, splash across the front pages of local newspapers and at another level, the story sucks up television viewing time. These pictures of our politicians handing over the keys to a dwelling house somewhere across the island do provide a good public relations image for the party and its leadership. Hooray again for the politics of scarce benefits and spoils, hooray for the politics that depends on fertilizing the cycle of dependence for its support – a scourge of our political system even before independence and practiced by every party that has formed the government of our country since 1962.

The circumstances from which this policy derived dates back to the late 1940s, when at the end of the second World War, Jamaica began to attract even greater overseas interest as a raw material producing country, joining as it were the global production line structure. In the circumstances, this necessitated a build-out of infrastructure around the capital city and in response to the need for labourers, droves of landless rural folks trekked into Kingston and adjoining areas in an effort to nab available jobs. As the numbers swelled, the opportunities for finding accommodation proved difficult and in the majority of cases, people squatted wherever they could find space.

Thus began “Dungle”, the largest squatter settlement in the hemisphere, where at one time more than 250,000 resided in the most squalid of conditions in an area that was less than four square miles. The colonial government – through the construction of the Trench Pen homes –attempted to ease the conditions, but those efforts opened the door to a type of benefits politics and by 1963, with the construction and delivery of Wilton Gardens (Rema) in the middle of Trench Town, the fuse was lit to what became the deadliest period in our island’s history.

Housing and the provision of jobs at the “grass roots” level is benefits politics in its purest form, and these are the benefits used by our political masters, over decades, to secure blocks of votes and the mechanism on which the foundations of our garrison politics has thrived. This begs the question though, of why couldn’t the same political players who have used up so much energy and guile to craft and manage such a system, apply those energies to instead create a culture of empowerment. The answer is simple: Give a man a fish and he eats for today and surely he will have to come again in the morning for his next meal.

The great poet Robert Nesta Marley answered this question in the songs

‘Ambush’: “And when you gonna get some food, Your brother’s gotta be your enemy…” and ‘Top Ranking’: “They don’t want us to unite, all they want us to do is keep on fussing and fighting. They don’t want to see us live together; All they want us to do is keep on killing one another…Top rankin’ (top rankin’)!”

It would be nice to believe as many perhaps do that such a policy is ultimately aimed at easing the circumstances of the poor and needy. History has shown that while that might have been the initial intent, the ultimate beneficiary is the politician. The objective being to use these benefits to control the votes in those communities, ultimately guaranteeing themselves political power in perpetuity, at the expense of the lives of their fellow Jamaicans who they claim to represent. The business of people representation is not about gifts and handouts, it is not about developing social services and then delivering these as favors with “strings” attached. Real people representation is about empowerment, providing services at the community and broader national level, through which everyday Jamaicans can develop and thrive without feeling obliged to anyone regardless of political stripe.

It is up to us Jamaicans to change this system and to see ourselves, not as victims, but as agents of the positive change we desire. Jamaicans must begin to push back against this type of divide and rule representation. As Marley said: “To divide and rule could only tear us apart; In every man’s chest, there beats a heart. So soon we’ll find out who is the real revolutionaries; And I don’t want my people to be tricked by mercenaries.”

We have to become our own revolutionaries.

Richard Hugh Blackford

richardhblackford@gmail.com