You should not be proud of a locust’s head. — Kalenjin proverb, Kenya

Physically, Jamaica is perhaps the most beautiful of all the Caribbean islands. In terms of natural resources we are blessed. We have some of the most talented people in the region. However, our true potential for economic growth and development will continue to be stunted unless we tame the rot of unenlightened self-interest that is rapidly eating away at the very core of our society.

“Super-profits, much of which is not reinvested in Jamaica, is the singular concern of far too many. Some who have the Praetorian Guards to protect them and their family don’t give two hoots about the rest of us. The devil take the hindmost is fast becoming the dominant theme of Jamaican life.” I wrote these words many years ago in one of my pieces.

Today, there are those who laugh vociferously when an old lady slips on a ripe banana peel and seriously injures herself. And too many people use their smartphones to capture the lowest points of human misfortune with a single perverse objective: “I must post it in on social media first.” Retweets and likes are their oxygen.

The “milk of human kindness” ( Macbeth 1:5), to borrow the words of William Shakespeare, has all but completely dried up in the breasts of far too many of us.

I remember reading many years ago a sad story in one of our newspapers about a truck transporting flour which had overturned in the cool climes of Moneague, St Ann. A large crowd gathered on the scene of the accident. I remember the news item said that the driver had been pinned in the cab. Eyewitnesses recited the painful manner in which the injured truck driver cried for help.

A good Samaritan, who worked in Ocho Rios, stopped to investigate. He recounted how difficult it was to get help to pull the driver from the cabin. Why? Scores of people were busy securing bags of flour for themselves.

Who remembers this other breaking news item?

Headline: ‘Chicken spill’

“This refrigerated truck was transporting chicken meat to rural Jamaica when it crashed and overturned on Spur Tree Hill yesterday morning. It was not immediately clear what caused the crash which the police said resulted in the driver being taken to hospital. However, the Sunday Observer was told that the truck’s contents of approximately 3,000 lb of chicken meat were looted.” ( Jamaica Observer, September 18, 2011)

My recollection is that subsequent reports of the unfortunate accident presented a grim picture of how looters helped themselves to numerous bags of chicken, well before the driver was helped.

The looting of “goods trucks”, as we say in local parlance, is not a new phenomenon in Jamaica.

I did a bit of quick research on the matter of the robbing of goods trucks that had been involved in accidents. I came upon some interesting news items in The Gleaner archives from as far back as the 1960s, where people handsomely helped themselves to the contents of overturned trucks — chicken, cement, liquor, and related items — prior to assisting the injured.

The ghastly Cyclops of self-defeating selfishness had cast its ugly shadows even before political independence in 1962.

Recall, colleague columnist Lance Neita, in an article titled ‘The church picnic that never made it back home’, published in the Jamaica Observer on September 12, 2015, noted that the aftermath saw panicked Jamaicans rummaging to find relatives who were on the train.

“The Mandeville and Spaulding hospitals, and all nearby clinics as far as May Pen, were crammed with victims transported by ambulance, car, truck, or handcarts. Alcan bauxite personnel from nearby Kirkvine, the Red Cross, the Jamaica Defence Force, the Jamaica Constabulary Force, doctors, nurses, fire brigades, and thousands of Jamaicans from every nook and cranny raced to the scene,” he said.

According to Neita, as people searched for relatives, pickpockets moved through the crowd, robbing the dead “in a brazen and merciless fashion”.

“It was said that one of them chopped off a victim’s arm to remove a wristwatch while the person was still gasping for life.” ( Jamaica Observer, September 1, 2017)

This dive into the lowest depths of depravity happened in a context where: “Fragments of human bodies were strewn among scores of twisted metal. Close to 200 persons lost their lives, and 700 sustained injuries in what was described as the worst rail disaster in Jamaica’s history, and the second worst rail disaster in the world at that time.” ( The Gleaner, September 3, 2001)

The truth is we began to descend the slippery slope of unenlightened self-interest decades ago. Today, however, we see our descent in real time via social and other media. I believe that while blind self-interest has always been a theme in our daily relations, it has now degenerated into a suffocating monstrosity. If we do not stop the march of this destructive and horrible beast there will not be much to leave to our children. For life would have become totally “nasty, brutish and short” (Thomas Hobbes).

Hellish fire

Two Fridays ago, a national mirror that showed a most reprehensible side of us was held up for all to see.

The reflection was horrible.

Last Monday, a story in the local Star newspaper, titled ‘Nobody helped him — Widow of man killed in gas station fire bemoans lack of compassion from passers-by’, gave us a tragic summary of the fire at Heaven’s Fesco gas station in Mandeville, Manchester.

It noted, inter alia: “The wife of Daniel Farquharson, the man who died as a result of injuries he sustained in a gas station fire in Mandeville, is pleading for videos and pictures of her husband circulating on social media to be taken down.

“The pig farmer and mechanic died Saturday afternoon at the University Hospital of the West Indies after being transferred from the Mandeville Regional Hospital.

“ ‘He didn’t get any help. Nobody was helping him, he was just there and they were just taking pictures, pictures! I heard that they were saying he was a madman that is why they didn’t help him,’ the wife said. ‘Instead of taking, you should be your brother’s keeper first.’ “

You might have a splinter of ice in your heart and iced water flowing through your veins if you read these snippets and did not get moved emotionally.

Whether we want to admit it or not, unenlightened self-interest is a national problem, a Frankenstein.

While we are making huge strides on the macroeconomic front, we are slipping rapidly down the ladder of “love thy neighbour as thyself”.

I don’t believe “a suh di ting set”. We can shift from the present noxious social trajectory. Other countries have done it. We need greater political will and matching actions. Time is not on our side.

Faulty track record

On the thorny matter of political will or lack thereof. Last Monday this news item, doubtless, raised the political antennae of many. Headline: ‘PNP president asks J’cans to give party chance to solve nation’s crime problem’ ( Nationwide News Network).

Dr Phillips’s record of reducing crime is spotty, at best. He did not get into double figures while he was at the crease as our minister of national security. This is a matter of public record.

As an example, an article in this newspaper on August 28, 2005 noted the following comparisons between Phillips and K D Knight, who also served as security minister: “K D Knight can boast 40 or more pieces of legislation to strengthen crime policy, new and better vehicles for the police force, new policy direction for the police, and a revitalised victim support programme, among other performance indicators. Phillips can make no such claim.”

I believe Phillips was a frightful failure as minister of national security. “In 2002 the murder rate moved to 40 per 100,000, and by 2005 it had risen to 64 per 100,000 population, placing Jamaica among nations with the highest murder rates in the world.” (Jamaica Constabulary Force: Police Crime Statistics)

On Phillips’s watch murders peaked at 1,674 in 2005. (Jamaica Constabulary Force: Police Crime Statistics)

Dr Peter Phillips and the People’s National Party (PNP) withdrew their support for the continuation of the states of public emergency (SOEs) in St James as well as sections of St Catherine and the Corporate Area in the face of 353 fewer Jamaicans murdered in 2018 compared to 2017. Up until when the PNP pulled the plug on the life-saving SOEs, figures from the Jamaica Constabulary Force showed that murders were down by 22.2 per cent. After the PNP’s withdrawal of support for the SOEs gunmen and criminal gang members who had not been killed, incapacitated, or captured almost immediately resumed their crime spree. I believe this was a monumental mistake by the PNP. It will cost them dearly in their bid to win seats, particularly in western Jamaica, in the upcoming general election.

Despite this unconscionable setback by Dr Phillips and the Opposition just over a year ago, the reimposition of the SOEs last April is once again bearing good fruit. Headline: ‘St James murder rate falls to 20-year low — six killings recorded this year’. The news item said, among other things: “With six killings in the first 44 days of 2020, the parish of St James, which was dubbed Jamaica’s murder capital in 2017, has seen its homicide rate fall to a 20-year low.

“At the current rate, about 50 people will be killed at year end. States of emergency imposed in the north-western parish over the last two years have pulled down the spate of killings, which spiked to a record high of 342 in 2017. That year, St James recorded a per-capita murder rate of 137 per 100,000, almost three times the national average. Killings fell to 103 in 2018, but rose to 152 the following year, which saw a three-month hiatus in the security crackdown.

“ ‘The hard work is paying off… We hope this trend will continue for the remainder of the year,’ said Superintendent Vernon Ellis, the commanding officer for the St James police.

“ ‘We are steadily falling into the pattern. In November, we went 21 consecutive days without a murder.’ ” ( The Gleaner, February 15, 2020)

It would be tragic were we to return to the grim conditions which existed under the Suppression of Crime Act, which lasted for 20 years having been implemented in 1974, and did not suppress crime.

It would be equally tragic were we to go back to the days of the knee-jerk creation of police squads. I presented incontrovertible evidence in a previous article on the innumerable failures of such squads.

There is no silver bullet to crime. I believe, however, that the Andrew Holness-led Administration is correct in its conscientious approach with regard to the implementation of the SOEs, zones of special operations (ZOSOs), alongside other enhanced security measures. It is critical that all the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted for the protection of citizens’ rights. We simply cannot continue to create communities of Jamaicans who see the State as the enemy.

Mail alert!

Recently, two of my readers drew my attention to this news item: ‘Jamaica must turn to God to break crime monster – Hosin’. ( The Gleaner, February 1, 2020) They have asked me to give a view on it. The story said, among other things:

“Delivering the keynote address at the recently held Caribbean Conference of Seventh-day Christian Prayer Breakfast, [Eric] Hosin, who is also president of Guardian Life, stated that if Jamaicans continue to ignore God, the country will see an unprecedented upsurge in crime.

“ ‘If we become the people that know not God, the evil that we see today, we nuh see nutten yet.’ “

I agree with Hosin 100 per cent.

I would add, though, that I do not think a firm belief in God is diametrically opposite to a belief in logic and action to solve our human problems. As a matter a fact, I think they are complementary.

Galileo famously said: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

I believe Jamaica, in general, has become too obsessed with materialism, a close cousin of instant gratification. A partial consequence is a massive deterioration in relationships of all types added to an already low trust environment. This is a powder keg.

There is nothing wrong with possessing ‘things’, but as someone said once, when possessions possess you then there is a problem.

I am not advocating here, by any means, for any kind of theocracy. I think, though, that a revitalisation of a personal consciousness which accepts that we did not make ourselves, and that we are accountable to a higher being, is vital.

If that very pivotal centre disappears completely I think our goose is cooked.

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