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MARK WIGNALL
Thursday, November 12, 2009
As each day in Jamaica becomes more dangerous than the one before it, Jamaicans are finding that the options which were available in past years to run away to foreign shores have significantly narrowed because of the global recession. In the 1950s and 1960s the dangers we faced were social and economic
Too many of our people were having too many children who were being exposed to substandard education. Too few liveable wage-earning opportunities existed, an urban drift began to choke and overwhelm main towns and capitals, especially Kingston, and a criminality born out of hopelessness began to appear. Jamaicans at that time saw Britain, Canada and the US as their saviours. The work was hard and the hours were long, but many did well and produced a more educated, professionally trained, socially mobile generation than themselves.
In the 1970s the dangerous and tightly spun tapestry of criminality and politics was artfully produced and when that was tied to the strident, radically leftist rhetoric of the persuasive Michael Manley and the birth of the high-powered rifle in the tapestry, the business class and their managers got scared. At that time they had done extremely well in highly inefficient but protected markets and low wages paid to a job market seemingly held in perpetual captivity to poverty.
After shipping away the rest of their money, they sold their properties at fire-sale rates then took up their families and ran. In the first part of the 1980s after Seaga's economic promise of "money jingling in yu pocket" had failed to materialise, those whose expectations had gone way ahead of political reality saw reason to run again. Crime as a major factor was becoming the standard, but economic factors and lack of educational opportunities were still a part of the Jamaican landscape.
At that time, the US and Canada were the preferred places, especially with those who had emigrated in former years now having the wherewithal and ability to secure their relatives' visas and pay their airfares.
In the 1990s something very troubling took place in this country. We became inured to our state of economic backwardness and exposure to criminality. We became used to crime plans leading nowhere, to daily reports of death by the gun and to a politics and governance which best expressed itself by its ability to easily blend with a subculture of corruption, ordinariness, and an acknowledgement that where we were was pretty much where we would remain in the social and economic space.
So we swam through the seas of political sharks in the 1990s and in the 2000s and became better at survival in a rotten system as the years rolled by. We were reminded that politics is all about, "who gets what, where and how" and saw the epitome of that in the financial meltdown of the mid-1990s. When PJ's much-vaunted Values and Attitudes campaign sputtered and died, it told us two things:
(1) The administration was never serious about it in the first place.
(2) The people were not buying the con job because at the society's top where all money and power were concentrated, good values and correct attitudes were strangers there.
In a polity long taken off track by crooked leadership and a people fed on the milk of that arrangement there was no utility value in being a good citizen and in obeying the laws of the country. So we became a sea of small sharks swimming along with bigger sharks.
The global recession has focused our energies on the pressing realities facing us. The US, Canada and England all have their economic hands tied by the economic fallout, the slowdown in commerce and continuing job losses. Just recently Lloyd's Banking Group PLC, a British bank 43 per cent owned by government, announced that it would be cutting about 4,300 jobs from the payroll. In the United States, the "jobless recovery" is still on.
In addition to the fact that among those abroad with strong family ties to Jamaica, remittances are significantly down, those of us still here who have been reminded once again how economically fragile we are and closer to a brush with the criminals' guns must face the additional fact that the US, Canada and Britain have nothing to offer us at this time.
With a political leadership devoid of a formula of governance or, if it has one, it is securely hidden, an economic direction saddled by a seemingly confused political directorate and security concerns born out of the JCF wrapped up in another puzzle, the only real option is to remain here, stew in our ignorance, cuss the politicians, look out for our own economic survival and continue to dodge the gunman's bullet.
Although they are in the majority, many times we tend to lose sight of the Jamaicans who, for economic reasons, can never leave Jamaica or those who, for whatever reason, have always seen home as the best place to earn, eat and live. Even if that grouping had never actually made the move to emigrate, the thought of it now has been made redundant by the crippling realities of the global recession.
So, if we are stuck here, what do we do? The first target is always the politicians. It is not unreasonable to assume that a political administration in power is the repository of all the knowledge in governance which went before it. We ask ourselves, if that is so, why the present JLP administration is acting as if it is the first political administration in the history of Jamaica, and why the rules governing its various policies are in the earliest possible stages of socio-political evolution.
The firing of the Central Bank governor Derick Latibeaudiere and the political encouragement to the resignation of Hardley Lewin as commissioner of police must have been seen as political pluses by those in the inner sanctum of the JLP Cabinet. And even if there were pluses for the political minds there, in what way does Latibeaudiere's firing and Lewin's removal bring positives in our lives, if not now, then in our tomorrows? Has the government attempted to explain this?
Today a mother's daughter from an inner-city enclave will be raped and a young man with poor educational achievement will be shot dead. But it is just as likely that an uptown store owner living in a gated community will be cut down by the gunman's bullet.
Arranging the resignation of Hardley Lewin will not make us feel any safer as we make our way to our homes this evening.
If we remain economically weak and vulnerable and increasingly exposed to becoming another statistic on the crime victim blotter and we have no means of protecting ourselves, nowhere to run and no place to hide, what purpose does this administration serve?
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