For the lizard to bask in the sun there must be a cave in view. — Shona proverb, Zimbabwe

Political administrations have more than just a responsibility to be proactive, they have a duty. They exist to serve and better the lives of people. Those that do not demonstrably achieve this, and other crucial objectives, more often than not end up — sooner or later — with their heads under the political guillotine.

We need to reimagine the public good with policies and programmes that are situated philosophically and politically at the broad political centre; whether centre left or centre right. This needs to be done with great urgency, as I noted last Sunday.

Luckily, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Of course, that is assuming we desire and/or have sufficient political will to achieve this objective.

Common denominators

In recent weeks, mass protests have broken out across different continents. Upheavals in Britain, Spain, Chile, Lebanon, Haiti, Ecuador, Hong Kong, and other countries have different causes, but they also share similarities in tone, tenor, and organisation. We would be remiss to ignore the significance of these demonstrations for us here at home. Those who dismiss these protests as mere evidence of what we refer to in local parlance as the ‘snow cone effect’ (copycat) are wrong.

Canadian philosopher and media and communication theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term “global village” some 55 years ago. He wrote that “pervasive technological advances would increasingly allow for instantaneous sharing of culture”. We are seeing what is happening all over the world in real time.

Human nature is human nature, irrespective of colour, ethnicity, or geographical locale. Its constancy and universal potency must never be discounted. It certainly cannot be silenced. For hundreds of years, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes have tried and failed.

Democratically elected governments who foolishly believe that they are royally appointed are also soon royally ejected from office.

Governments are trustees of the people. There is no insular utopia on this planet. Like Chief Seattle said in his letter to US President Franklin Pierce in 1854, “All things are connected.”

In a recent interview on the multi-award-winning American news magazine programme 60 Minutes, Christine Lagarde, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who is now president of the European Central Bank, said: “If my neighbours from across a border are feeling desperate, are starving, are fighting, there will be consequences back at home.”

Whatever we think of the IMF, and Lagarde in particular, the fact is her words here ring with a profound truth. Those who remain locked away in what they imagine to be bulletproof cocoons, which are but convenient webs of denials, are in a race against the clock — unless they “wake up and live” like Bob Marley prescribed.

In one of my favourite songs by Jamaican and international recording artiste Freddie McGregor, entitled All in the Same Boat, he sings: “We come a long way, but remember where we been. We gotta go back to the old beliefs again. To find a way that we can all survive. And give our children a chance to live their lives. Our leaders speak so lot for us to hear the same ole words that drive us all to fear. They don’t know just what the people feel, ’cause everywhere the message is so clear.

“We are all in the same boat, living in a world with just one hope. All in the same boat. Oh, that’s life all over.”

There is a cry across the globe against the failures of what we commonly call the political left and right. The extremes of that political continuum have not only failed, they have done so miserably. We need to “tek sleep and mark death”, as rural folks say.

As I explained last week, we urgently need a new ambition for the State. This model needs to focus on physical and personal regeneration, not redistribution. The result of a stable economy cannot be prolonged inequality. Many of the recent protests are a direct reaction to growing inequality at all levels of the respective societies. There are some among us who seem to believe that ‘Oliver Twist’, like poverty, is par for the course. That is crazy!

People took to the streets in Chile, for example, because of increases in transport prices. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported, among other things, last Monday: “The Government blamed higher energy costs and a weaker currency for its decision to increase bus and metro fares, but protesters said it was just the latest measure to squeeze the poor.”

As demonstrators clashed with security forces on Friday evening, President Sebastián Piñera was pictured dining in an upmarket Italian restaurant — a sign, some said, of the chasm between Chile’s political elite and the people on the streets.

Chile is one of Latin America’s wealthiest countries, but also one of its most unequal. It has the worst levels of income equality among the 36 member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

In Ecuador and Lebanon the cries were similar: We cannot afford the increases in food, transportation and other basic services. People blame mismanagement of their national resources and injudicious leadership for the hardships that are being piled upon their heads. The explanations of governments that it is the fault of the IMF is not being bought, and rightly so.

We need to pay attention here. I have argued repeatedly that we cannot go back to the bad old days when the economy was not only put on its knees, but on its face by the People’s National Party (PNP), particularly during the 70s and 90s. I provided details last week.

Righteous indignation against corruption, attempts to reduce political and other freedoms, and climate change have angered millions to take to the streets in Spain, Hong Kong, Haiti and Britain. This Andrew Holness-led Jamaica Labour Party JLP) Administration needs to pay attention. There is a new game in town.

What unity?

The PNP evidently does not recognise that the times are a-changing. The birds were absolutely correct when they tweeted long before the leadership battle that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would not be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Dr Dayton Campbell, Member of Parliament for St Ann North Western, former Opposition spokesperson on health, and campaign manager for the defeated ‘Rise United’ outfit, has been proven wrong. Days before the results of September 7, Campbell said at a rally that damaged relationships and seeds of animus would disappear after the leadership race.

The miasma of divisiveness, vindictiveness, and back-stabbing are alive and well weeks after Dr Peter Phillips was elected as president of Norman Manley’s party. The PNP is evidently unified in division and split into factions of ‘OnePNP’, led by Peter Phillips, and Rise United, commanded by Peter Bunting, Member of Parliament for Manchester Central and Opposition spokesperson on education and training.

The culling and purging of Bunting’s loyalists is apparently being done with a rusty political scalpel. It is accepted that a good surgeon needs very steady hands. This prerequisite is conspicuously missing at the operation table to save a patient who is flat-lining.

Recall that less than 24 hours after Phillips’s glad-handing West Jamaica Conference of Seventh-Day Adventist Churches’ Western Leadership Conference in Montego Bay, St James, this tweet came from ace newsman Abka Fitz-Henley: “Supporters of Peter Bunting [have been] ejected to the back benches of the House of Representatives in new seating arrangements as the Dr Peter Phillips faction of the PNP moves to assert itself on the 81-year-old party.”

The political bloodletting is obviously unabated.

Headline: ‘PNP in a pickle — Outspoken Bunting backer leaves key KSAMC committee after Phillips backers lose confidence in her’ ( Jamaica Observer, Saturday, October 19, 2019)

The story said, among other things:

“The self-inflicted wounds of the People’s National Party (PNP) during its recent presidential elections are continuing to bleed despite efforts by the victor, Dr Peter Philips, to cover them with a band-aid, with talk of unity and malice towards none.

“The latest war zone is the Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation (KSAMC), where backers of Phillips and the man he defeated, Peter Bunting, seemingly have daggers drawn.

“The tension in the municipal body boiled over into the public domain yesterday when Councillor Kari Douglas, an outspoken supporter of Bunting, charged that she was resigning as leader of the PNP’s team on the KSAMC’s Building and Town Planning Committee because she was being targeted by Phillips supporters.

“In a letter to Andrew Swaby, the leader of the PNP’s team in the KSAMC, Douglas, the councillor for the Trafalgar Division in St Andrew South Eastern, claimed that she was forced to resign based on resistance from Phillips supporters who were adamant that she should not remain in the post.”

Mountains of evidence prior to and immediately before the run-up to the leadership race and afterwards show that the PNP is eating away at itself. These most recent revelations last Sunday are simply exposing more of the rotten innards of the PNP.

Last week’s lead news story of The Sunday Gleaner screamed: ‘Housen rips ‘lazy’ PNP — Former standard-bearer breaks silence on resignation from key seat; warns sloth among second-tier leaders a threat to party hopes’.

The front-page article said, among other things: “My departure as the caretaker of West Rural St Andrew was certainly not precipitated by the Fifth Column that operated there. By no means,” Housen says in a column published in The Sunday Gleaner today.

“I had the strength in depth to deal with those. It was the enabling of that Fifth Column by those ‘up above’ that was to be the proverbial back-breaking straw. The repeated complaints to the then party regional hierarchy to deal with the constant undermining and sabotage was met with, ‘Just press on, Comrade,’ ” Housen recounted of her experience.

She said the secretariat of the party failed to deal with the problems she was having in the constituency, and so did the executive. Political newcomers often require substantial help from the generals of their party, but Housen also felt she was not getting that support either, and she was left on her own in her quest to bag what is a must-win seat for the PNP.

In her resignation letter to Julian Robinson, general secretary, last year, Housen lamented that her first meeting with Phillips was 17 months after she had been on the ground working in the constituency, and five months after she was officially installed there.

Political atrophy is killing the PNP. Among other things, demonstrators across many continents, in recent weeks, are demanding political and other types of representation in which people are the main event and not the undercard. Has the PNP noticed?

Mail Alert!

The reactions to my column last week were numerous. I am responding in this space to two of many questions sent to me via e-mail, because I believe my readers will benefit.

Question 1: “So how did Singapore get all this expertise to innovate in so many areas?”

Many years ago Lee Kuan Yew did a lecture at Harvard University [John F Kennedy School of Government], where he made the very important point that Singapore achieved it meteoric improvements in education, innovations, social mobility, housing, etc, by studying how other countries excelled in these and other developmental areas and, thereafter, they tailored these solutions to the particular needs of Singapore.

As a matter of fact, Singapore had clusters of representatives whose job it was to study models of excellence across the globe. They still use that approach today.

Another profound statement Lee Kuan Yew made in the lecture was that Singapore grabbed advantage from the jaws of disadvantage. They took the approach that no matter the dire circumstances they would learn from those who have ‘technological know-how’, and then beat them at their own game.

Question 2: “If the left and right have failed, what is the alternative?”

People are demonstrating across many continents because they are losing and/or have lost hope.

A human being without hope is a most dangerous animal.

Ultimately, we come back to the question of why governments exist. Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to the citizens of Washington county in 1809, said: “The care of human life, happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”

Too many governments are failing at the provision of happiness.

Given the massive failures of market economic fundamentalism, we need governments that are deliberately ‘activist’ in their practical orientation in relation to the needs of their people. If an Administration cannot provide the majority of its citizens with real hope, not pie in the sky, but real hope, and the means of sustained opportunity to better their lives, it deserves to be booted.

There needs to be more rigorous systems of holding public officials accountable. Public servants who do not truly serve the public cannot, as a matter of course, move up the promotion ladder via outdated rungs of seniority.

We cannot throw our hands in the air and scream, “Nuh betta nuh deh!” We have to recognise that No One is Coming to Save Us — title of book by Stephanie Powell Watts — we have to save ourselves.

Garfield Higgins is an educator and journalist. Send comments to the Observer or higgins160@yahoo.com.