Ideas and practices, whether economic, social, cultural, and/or political, must be subject to the scalpel of obsolescence. Just as manufactured goods have a sell-by date, a society’s ideas and practices must also. This to prevent persons with primal proclivities from making us their hostage.

Too many of us are fixated on ideas and practices that no longer have any significant utilitarian value. Similarly, many of us are hanging on to to ideas and practices that are no longer relevant to the global stage. Our continued tight embrace of them is the equivalent of an alligator-like death roll in which we are the prey.

Poet Victor Hugo famously said, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” I think nothing is more dangerous than ideas and practices whose time have come and gone but significant sections of a society continue to clasp and cuddle them.

Right quick, some are going to say, folks cling and clinch bad practices and ideas because they just cannot do better. I do not agree. Like noted writer Paulo Coelho, I think, “A mistake repeated more than once is a decision.” Either we alter our decisions or hug the whirlwind.

Terror on wheels

Like many, I saw on social media the horrifying video of passengers screaming — some shouting epithets which cannot be reproduced here — as a taxi man tried his devilish best to evade the police. Thankfully, no one was killed; unfortunately, there were physical injuries, one person was hospitalised, and many were left traumatised by last Monday’s chilling incident, which some sections of the media said happened during peak-hour traffic.

Howls of anger understandably gushed out onto various media platforms. Some people were angry that the police did not shoot the taxi driver after he was captured. Some were livid that the police had fired warning shots, evidently in the air. Several were incensed that the police had given chase. They argued that the police should have simply let the vehicle go on its way. While numerous individuals rained blows on the Government for what they said was the ramshackle state of public transportation, especially in the Kingston Metropolitan Transport Region (KMTR).

Now, I am not at all trivialising the ordeal that fellow citizens experienced last Monday. But it seems to me that each time the immediate fear of the horror movie which we again saw last Monday subsides, some among us simply resume regularly scheduled programming — which is doing the same thing over again, but hoping for a different result.

As I see it, the lion’s share of the blame for the horror on wheels incident of last Monday must be placed where it truly belongs, squarely at the feet of the passengers who consciously took the ‘robot’ taxi.

Except for those who recently landed here from Mars, it is known that robot taxis are illegally operated vehicles. Yet, many among us prefer to continue to risk life and limb by patronising these illegal operators. Many are notorious for breakneck speeding; unrivalled rudeness; deplorable hygiene; ganja and alcohol use while driving; and the blasting of loud, lewd, and crude ‘music’. Decades of this putrid mix has not shifted the decision curve in sufficient numbers of the travelling public against the miscreants who operate robot taxis to put them out of business.

Honest brokers will acknowledge that modes of public transportation have significantly improved in the KMTR and many other urban centres over the last 30 years. Yet robot taxis survive and thrive.

On many occasions in recent times and yesteryear I have seen Jamaica Urban Transit Company (JUTC) buses near empty, travelling along numerous routes. Many of these buses have air-conditioning, are clean, and spacious. Yet every day, hundreds of Jamaicans risk their lives and those of their children aboard robot taxis. Why?

They claim they get to their destinations faster. This ‘reasoning’ to me is nonsensical, because during peak hours there is a traffic jam in most parts of the nation’s commercial capital and the urban centres across the island. Hardly anyone is going anywhere “quick and fast”, as we say in the streets. Yet many among us are clinging to an idea and practice of public transport which is antithetical to the very preservation of life. Something is awfully rotten in the State of Jamaica.

Personal responsibility

Acceptance of personal responsibility does not fetch a premium, nor is it a big vote-getter in our country. I suspect that is a large part of the explanation as to why so many of our citizens believe someone else is responsible for their every action or inaction, and must, therefore, bear the consequences of either. I will not join those who are doing their level best to make the rogue taxi driver in the mentioned incident a victim.

Reports in sections of the media said this miscreant had accumulated 19 unpaid tickets between 2020 and 2021. I have seen this movie before. Malefactors involved in daredevil stunts while transporting passengers, who are happy and willing patrons until something goes wrong and innate fear takes over from a cultivated impulse to support wrongdoing and wrongdoers.

There are some among us who evidently believe that the laws of the land do not apply to them. The State, of course, has to accept much of the blame for this rotten state of affairs. It has failed over donkey’s years to rid the streets of a threat which has now metastasised.

The robot taxi business continues to mushroom because of its many aiders and abettors in high and low places. Is there more than a grain of truth that several members of the country’s security apparatus are owners of robot taxis? Is is true that several members of the nation’s political ecosystem are owners of robot taxis?

Better days ahead?

I have long declared in this space that I believe that, where moral suasion repeatedly fails, appropriately tailored legislations should be crafted and comprehensively implemented. In that respect, I see a bright light at the end of the tunnel. And I am reasonably sure it is not another train coming.

Last Wednesday this newspaper reported, among other things: “Regulations for the new Road Traffic Act finally made their way to Parliament on Tuesday, after three years since the passage of the Bill, which had seen Government and Opposition at loggerheads up to November.”

This flash of light was preceded by another last Tuesday. The Jamaica Teaching Council Bill was tabled in the House of Representatives. To my recollection, after 15 years of delay. The Bill seeks to establish a governing body for the teaching profession and to institute a regime for the licensing and registration of all government-paid teachers.

The council will have the power to suspend and cancel the registration of a teacher who has been charged with a disqualifiable offence, such as sexual assault, murder, pornography, robbery, and fraud.

Minister of Education and Youth Fayval Williams deserves some credit in this matter.

The upcoming debates on these watershed matters need to be rigorous. Fit for purpose, in my humble view, should be the major consideration in the coming debates.

‘Wi set di ting’

On that score of fit-for-purpose, my The Agenda column last week, among other things, centred on the folly of Jamaica’s continued implementation of neo-liberal economic policies minus tailoring them to the needs of our country. I received many e-mail responses from individuals who vociferously argued that the invisible hand of capitalism cannot be and should never be moderated or regulated. Leave everything to market forces they posited. What rubbish! The so-called ‘invisible hand of the market’, left to certain interests, will forever clap in one direction.

One major bank last week decided to delay the implementation of a hike in its user services fees. It did not do so because of a sudden gush of magnanimity. It did so because the Jamaican people placed enough pressure on the entity to force it to pull back. As we say in local parlance, “Pressure buss pipe.”

There is no preordained hand determining market forces. It is humans at work. Human action is predictable and alterable. We must reject the nonsense that “a suh di ting set”. In fact, it is people who set ‘di ting’, market economics and all.

Retroactive folly

“We run tings, tings nuh run we,” are lines from a famous song by local deejay, Red Dragon. If the country, in general, understood the importance of personal control and responsibility, as espoused in this song, I think we would have long ago ditched the idea and practice of ‘back money’ or retroactive payments as it is more popularly known. I think paying workers retroactively is a practice whose time has come and gone, yet significant sections of our society are regrettably still wedded to it.

It is now February, 10 months after the Jamaica Police Federation (JPF) and the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) should have signed a new wage agreement with the Government. When the teachers and the police do sign a wage agreement, and get their ‘back money’, will it have the same value as 10 months ago? The skyrocketing cost of food, gas, and other critical goods and services tell me absolutely not.

We need a radical shift in our thinking and actions. Local unions need a new negotiation focus and new techniques. I maintain that protracted wage negotiations which take upwards of nine months, and sometimes even longer, to conclude don’t really benefit workers. It’s full time Government and unions work out a way for salary negotiations to be completed in a maximum of 90 days.

This should be a minimum standard cast in concrete and set in stone.

Of course, I can hear the voices of certain people in the bureaucracy: “It cannot be done.”

Anyway, no one can deny that teachers and the police deserve more than a four per cent increase. The reality is the country, as I see it, does not have the ability to pay much more at this time. I think the Government, too, may be locked into an agreement which does not allow them to give more than four per cent on pain of reopening wage negotiation with all groups that have already signed the new one-year wage agreement.

The Government will, doubtless, have to pump in some sweeteners on the allowance side to break the stalemate between them, the teachers, and the police, while reassuring them that the announced overhaul of the structure of salaries and other emoluments in the civil service, to make it more equitable, is on track for its implementation start date of April 2022.

Minister of Finance and the Public Service Dr Nigel Clarke told the country last November that the Government was “confident it will be able to commence implementation of the proposed public sector compensation review in April 2022. If we are to cease moving by mere inches — as we have been doing for now approaching 60 years — and make great leaps forward, we are going to have to abandon many ideas and practices that are millstones around our necks. It is a conscious act!

Self-preservation

On that point of conscious decisions. Consider this headline: ‘Arming more Jamaicans could complicate crime problem – Bailey’ ( The Gleaner, January 27, 2022). The news item also noted that: “Bailey said, while the decision on whether more citizens should have access to licensed firearms is for policymakers, he is not certain that the current crime trajectory will change with more guns in the hands of law-abiding Jamaicans.”

I disagree with Deputy Commissioner of Fitz Bailey. I think criminals have been killing law-abiding Jamaicans with near impunity because they know that most of us do not have the means to defend ourselves. Houses in places like Cherry Garden and Jack’s Hill are seldom broken into. I think a major reason is that criminals know that many residents in these communities have the means to effectively repel them.

I believe that when the State cannot protect its citizens it must enable the law-abiding, proportional means to protect themselves.

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