Writing in The Sunday Gleaner on March 6, Phillip Paulwell, the six-term Member of Parliament for Kingston Eastern and Port Royal, laments the low voter turnout and “political tribalism” which have prevented Jamaica from becoming the paradise its people want.

Jamaica’s political system, Mr Paulwell tells us, is a desperate, violence-associated, zero-sum game in which power rotates between Government and Opposition. The winners attempt to govern in the best interest of the society as they see it and the losers hope that the Government will fail in order for them to get elected.

Highlighting a 24-percentage point decline in the voter turnout, spread over four general elections, from 61.46 per cent in 2007 to 37.85 per cent in 2020, Mr Paulwell suggests that the model of government is not working. He says there is a “trust deficit” among the electorate and that the high level of voter apathy is “deeply disturbing”. For Mr Paulwell, political tribalism is at fault.

To convince the electorate that their participation is important, Mr Paulwell proposes that the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) put aside political tribalism and reach a consensus “to drive a constitutional reform agenda”.

There is no doubt that bipartisan consensus on constitutional reform is needed to do things such as establish the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as the nation’s highest court and make the country a republic. But does Mr Paulwell have a sufficient understanding of voter apathy, despite his enormous contribution to its development? Does he really believe it is a problem of political tribalism to be resolved constitutionally? And a “systemic” problem having to do with the “model of government”?

Before he starts “interrogating the societal arguments surrounding voter apathy”, “interrogating” the Gleaner‘s proposal for proportional representation and attending the meetings on the constitution at Vale Royal he proposes, it might be helpful if he were to go and gently ask (no interrogation, please) the good people of Kingston Eastern and Port Royal, whom he has been representing for 25 straight years, why 65.22 per cent of them turned out to vote in 1997 when he was first elected and only 25.56 per cent of them turned out to vote in 2020, when he was last elected, a 40-percentage point decline?

Perhaps Mr Paulwell should interrogate himself to find out why out of 63 constituencies, that which he has represented for 25 years has the lowest voter turnout in the land. I am sure some of his constituents would be happy just to see him.

Mr Paulwell, following from the Gleaner, puts forward proportional representation as a possible solution to voter apathy. But while proportional representation will bring more politicians to Parliament, which might well be his objective, if not that of the Gleaner, it is unlikely to bring more people to the polls. I was thinking that Mr Paulwell is deliberately dodging the real issues behind the dismal performance of his party at recent polls but as I have no evidence, I will not write it. Perhaps blinded by the light at what appears to be his recent epiphany, he has misread the situation and, being penitent, has now come to accept that political tribalism explains everything.

But Mr Paulwell is not alone in the mistaken and misleading notion that political tribalism explains voter turnout and much else besides. In a recent article in The Gleaner, Dr Alfred Dawes made this amazing statement: “Rest assured that the voter turnout [at the 2020 elections] was significantly higher in polling divisions drawn from the garrisons. The middle and upper classes have the worst turnouts. The garrisons choose our government when the voter turnout is low.” There is no evidence to support such a spurious claim.

In the 2020 General Election, the six constituencies with the lowest voter turnout were East Kingston and Port Royal, with Phillip Paulwell, 25.56 per cent; North West St James with “Dacta” Chang, 28.16 per cent; East Central St Andrew, with Dacta Phillips 29.47 per cent; North West St Andrew, with Dacta Clarke, a political neophyte, 30.16 per cent; South West St Andrew, with Dacta Brown-Burke, 30.38 per cent; and Central St Catherine, with Babsy Grange a mere 30.46 per cent. Mainly political multi-star generals and doctor politicians. How many of these six constituencies are “garrisons” and how many of them are peopled by the middle and upper classes? For the sake of brevity, the three constituencies with the highest voter turnout were South West St Elizabeth (52.15 per cent); South East St Elizabeth (50.53 per cent); and South East St Mary (50.38 per cent). Dr Dawes has clearly made a mistake.

Mr Paulwell believes political consensus is lacking. He is mistaken. There is consensus, Mr Paulwell. There is a great deal of consensus on the neoliberal PNP/JLP/IMF policies that have been imposed on this country for the last four decades and created a “utopia of endless exploitation”. Consensus has been reached on the financialisation of the economy; on the debt reduction strategy; and on cutting the size of the State, privatising its assets, severely diminishing its role in economic and social life and facilitating its capture by monied interests. There is consensus, Mr Paulwell, between the two sets of political tribal leaders and their financial masters to surreptitiously undo democratic governance, make State institutions “independent” of democratic control, geld the unions, rewrite the tax codes and place legal shackles (fiscal responsibility law) on politicians to prevent them from being responsive to the demands of the electorate. Trust in institutions, including the political system, has been deliberately eroded and government, adjudged to be incompetent and corrupt, is watched over by so-called non-governmental organisations, financed by other governments.

A low voter turnout suits those who wish for the people to lose interest in the State as provider or arbiter and for them (the people) to take “personal responsibility” for their own affairs. As was intended, voters have stayed away from polls. Why vote if politics and tiefing politicians offered no solution, no alternative? Is it not better to take “personal responsibility” for one’s own welfare? To build one’s own separate, moral political economy? Or better yet to escape what Andrew Salkey’s Obeah Man, Dada Johnson, called this “suicide place”. “And since everything is financialised, and politics nah duh nutten fi mi, if you want my vote (and I suspect you don’t really need it) then yuh gwine affi pay mi fi it.”

The problem of voter apathy, I suspect, is not a constitutional one. It is a political one. It is about competing interests and the ownership and distribution of resources. People need to trust that the political system will work for them, will do things for them and will help them to improve their lives. That is why they vote. But if trust between the electorate and the politicians could be destroyed and the State made useless, feckless and incompetent, then liberated marketeers, scammers, scoundrels and privateers would be free to delegitimise, capture and dominate the State and use it to serve their own nefarious interests.

With a severely diminished electorate, neo-liberal policies, faced with reduced resistance are that more implementable. Politicians do not govern in the best interest of the society, Mr Paulwell, they operate according to the dictates of their grand master puppeteers, the vested interests who pull their strings.

For the last three decades, especially in the years between 2013 and 2016, a period of severe austerity, under the Extended Fund Facility agreed with the IMF, the PNP has strayed far from its core values. It never addressed inequality when it was in power. And it chose not to educate the people about the constraints imposed by the domestic and international political economy and the choices available to them.

It insisted there was no alternative. It lost the 2016 elections by approximately 3,000 votes on a voter turnout of 48 per cent after stuffing the bitter medicine, that had been earlier expelled, down the throats of the people while shovelling state assets down the maws of privateers.

In 2020, it lost by 102,000 votes on a voter turnout of 38 per cent, after it failed to differentiate and distinguish itself from the other side. One of its fundamental errors in Opposition is its failure to be reflective, to offer a critique of the punishing austerity policies, that it had implemented and which have been continued by the JLP.

Instead, the PNP has chosen to claim credit for them, frequently complaining that its role in their “success” has gone unheralded. Its idea of opposition is to examine every Government policy and then say, “a we do dat first”. It is a pathetic way to run an Opposition party.

Mr Paulwell says sometimes politicians can be their own worst enemies, bad talking each other and causing disaffection among the people. The decline in the voter turnout, he says, may be inversely related to that. Believe me, Mr Paulwell, it is not bad talk; it is bad policy which is the cause of the discontent. People a suffa and because politics cyaan help and won’t help, they have turned away.

Again, why vote if there is no alternative? Did you know, Mr Paulwell, that your party got far fewer votes in the 2020 general elections (38 per cent voter turnout) than it did 40 years previously in the 1980 General Election (87 per cent voter turnout)? Do you think that had anything to do with the bad things your party said about the other? If ever there was a time when politicians said bad things about each other (and caused the people to do bad things to themselves) it was 1980.

What I would urge Mr Paulwell and the party he represents to do is to present the people with an alternative to the agreed “Washington consensus” — one that will address their concerns about the moral and social injustices of inequality, unemployment and poverty. To rid the people of their apathy, it is necessary to offer them a choice. Try it and see. Without it, the chances of power “rotating” to Mr Paulwell’s party will remain slim and he himself runs the risk that fewer than 20 per cent of the good people of East Kingston and Port Royal will turnout at the next election. Mr Paulwell’s party lost in several of its strongholds in the last general elections.

It is right that Mr Paulwell’s party is undertaking a self-evaluation, including an examination of its core values and why electoral support for it has diminished. It needs to restore people’s trust in it as a progressive force, a force for change. Mr Paulwell should make his contribution to that process. It ought, however, to be more substantial than that which he has offered in the pages of newspapers.

Ambassador Emeritus Audley Rodriques served in many diplomatic postings, among them as top Jamaican envoy to Venezuela, and Kuwait.