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Life in Jamaica is worth little
WIGNALL'S WORLD
Mark Wignall
Sunday, September 06, 2009
It is 9:00 am on Wednesday. There is peak-hour traffic, an annoyingly slow bumper-to-bumper movement, on the very busy Barbican Road. A 73-year-old man sits in his vehicle as it inches along. According to reports, a lone gunman on foot approaches the vehicle and the elderly man is peppered with bullets.
All week there have been reports of murders, especially in our urban, inner-city slums where children are growing up under trauma that will only make matters worse 10 years from now. Having become inured to daily reports of shooting deaths, we no longer cringe at the statistics or the details and the ferocity of the killings. We no longer recognise our personal trauma because, as a tool perhaps to maintain our sanity, we simply hold our heads straight, walk like robots through the social smog that this nation has become and pretend that the racing pulse beat is pure imagination.
Mired in more than our fair share of ignorance, the educated and intelligent political leadership has, over many years of practice, mastered the art of turning us on every five years, then spitting us out until our votes are needed in the next elections.
Violent crime is out of control, our political leaders are clueless, and our people have long forgotten that nebulous credo known as personal responsibility. We pay our politicians fairly well when all is added up, and it is known that some politicians pay themselves quite well too. The question is, have we identified that point where political leadership and personal responsibility meet on the graph? An even bigger question is, if we have decided that it is each man for himself and that we will go from day to day hearing nothing, seeing nothing, telling nothing, while our politicians have encapsulated themselves in their bubbles in the sky, does not that constitute sound reason for us to declare Jamaica a failed state?
And, of course, we are forced to ask once again, how did we come to this?
Let me relate to you a little story. In the 1990s I met a Jamaican businessman who was living and doing quite well for himself in the USA. He told me that in the 1980s after his business had met the level of success that he had envisioned and he had professionals running it, he felt a genuine urge to give back something to the country.
GOLDING... is not, at this time, a man to be envied
He had had an affinity to one of our political parties and, through contacts, was able to convince the leadership to allow him to enter representational politics. After gaining the selection in a particular constituency, in the first week, he was all fired up about building up and rolling out his constituency organisation.
Word came to him a few days later that a team of men from the area wanted to sit down and talk with him about urgent matters affecting the constituency. He arranged a meeting. I don't remember the exact number of men who showed up, but it could have been four or five. The conversation went something like this: "Boss, di odda man dem have more gun dan wi and if wi nuh get more gun, wi cyaan win." One of the men opened a canvas bag and began to slowly remove the firearms they had carried with them. The new politician on the block almost fainted.
"I don't understand," he said. "I am not very comfortable with these matters."
One of the men who was the obvious leader said to him as he removed a slip of paper from his shirt pocket, "Boss, yu nuh haffi worry bout dem tings dey. We will deal wid dat." Then he began to read from the paper. It was a list of the number and types of guns needed. "We a leave dis wid you, boss. When yu deal wid it, jus call wi."
Within a month, he exited politics. Shortly after, he and his family emigrated.
The power, the glory and the sad reality
I have a friend, a solid PNP supporter, who tells me that 'good politician' is an oxymoron. I am at pains telling him that if we in this country continue to preach that all politicians are mixed up with gunmen, we will eventually wipe the landscape clean of decent politicians and accept only the dross and the dregs seeking power at all costs.
But let us call a spade a spade. It was the 'garrisonisation' of our politics which consummated the marriage of guns and politics. Power naturally floats towards power. Where the politician of the 1960s and 1970s was this godlike creature who had the power to issue state largesse to those with whom he found favour, the street elements gravitated towards him and he towards them.
Second, the politician saw the police force as house slaves, so the politician, the gunman and some senior policemen would find favour with one another.
If in the mix a community man was dealing in the illegal export of ganja to the USA and he wanted to grow his base, that druggist would also find reason to strike an alliance with the politician who was allied to the gunman and the crooked cops.
If an overly ambitious businessman wanted to move up fast and steal a little of the socioeconomic space controlled by the twenty-one families, he would donate to the politician who would drink liquor with the gunman who knew the crooked cops who protected the druggist. In time, in almost Orwellian fashion, it became difficult to differentiate between politician, gunman, crooked cop, druggist and businessman.
Power desires that all ends of the power spectrum operate in a closed/looped setting.
It is politically correct to assume that even though elements of those alliances still exist in our polity, there have been radical shifts in the spectrum. The politician is no longer the all-conquering earthly god.
Whereas in the earlier years he was able to supply funds to gunmen who were prepared to shed the blood of those who supported the other side, during the period of the 1980s the lines between gunman and druggist became blurred. A merger had taken place.
As the crooked cops, and the gunman/druggist grew tighter in their union, some of the businessmen who had dabbled heavily in the ganja trade of the 1970s outgrew the crude alliances. In the social whoosh which sounded, the politician found himself as the 'bwoy' in the picture.
Today, we laud the businessmen who made it through ganja runnings in the 1970s but hurl barbs at those who stick closer to the streets and the poorer among us.
But history tells us that those political strongmen who spent too much time fingering their umbilical attachments to politicians and seeking to be constantly fed from their dried-up teats met deaths which had striking similarities. It was almost as if the state was trying to redress the balance in the sick power spectrum.
The abandonment of the poor
Most of the rural poor who came to the capital city in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s ended up in ghettoes in the city and on the perimeter surrounding it. Their first dreams were a visa and a ticket to the land of opportunity.
When that failed to materialise, they crowded the city, as well as the outskirts, and that presented the politician with a logistical nightmare that he somehow turned into his opportunity. The magic word was HOUSING. Housing slums were razed and in their place housing garrisons were built.
As state resources were diverted to provide housing for these poor, often under-educated people, one would have had to be a monster to disagree with politicians as they rolled out these high-rises. It was, in the immediate instance, a win-win situation for the politician. One, he secured his political base for life. Two, he was shown to have love for the poor.
Third, where public commentators and social scientists had no answer to the immediate problems of the poor - lack of housing - all bought into the idea that before a poverty-stricken man could educate himself and go out looking for work, he needed to live somewhere.
What no one had a solution for was the irresponsible behaviour which would arise. After paying a few months' peppercorn mortgages most residents ceased all payment. At the same time, the politician turned a blind eye when the residents ceased paying for water supplies and, through community enforcers, JPS found itself on the dark outside, looking in at the free light burning at the expense of the law-abiding citizens.
As the state largesse dried up - after all, the politician could always say, "I gave you housing. What more do you want?" - many of these garrison residents found that the free housing still did not allow them to eat.
Into that social space walked the community enforcer, the community leader. These zones of exclusion where the vote was determined long before election day saw a sort of hands-off relationship between the political representative and the community leader.
He became the community government. In communities right across the island, the impotent politician found that his stock of political Viagra had been depleted.
In addition to contracts which would come from the state, the community leader opened legitimate businesses, funded families who fell on hard times, provided school fees and lunch money and instituted a justice system that, if seen, is a wonder and a shock to behold. It is crude and brutal, but it meets the needs of the community's residents as it keeps out rapists, robbers and those foolish enough to consider harming the elderly.
That is just a fact of Jamaica's present reality.
The case of Tivoli Gardens
There is just no way of avoiding the discussions which have arisen as a result of the US DEA claim that Tivoli Gardens don "Dudus" is a person of immediate interest to them. Like all who make commentary in the public space, I will express no views on his state of innocence or guilt. He has a competent lawyer in Tom Tavares-Finson.
I met Dudus nine years ago in Tivoli Gardens and must confess that I didn't expect it when someone said to me, "Come, I want a man like you to meet a certain someone." In the years prior to that I had been the harshest critic of Eddie Seaga, then MP for West Kingston. A party was being held in celebration of Seaga's birthday. As I approached the man, the person said to me, "This is the president."
I smiled somewhat because at that time, I had not yet heard of the 'president' accolade. We shook hands and then I walked away. Then I said to the person, "What is it with the president thing?" That's when he told me.
PNP supporters are alive with glee, and last Thursday one of them with whom I am familiar said to me, "Yu a pressure yu JLP party, but mi know sey a jus smokescreen dat." I laughed at him because if I should ever follow up every bit of ribbing I get every day, I would have no time for anything else.
My first observation was that the information package on Dudus from the US authorities was opened at just about the same time that Jamaica has signalled to the IMF and other international lending agencies that it is flat broke.
In the geo-political space, it appears that Jamaica is naked and being held over a barrel. The second and, in my mind, most important observation is that there has been an allegation made by the US authorities that they have been monitoring Dudus running guns.
Now, we have the word of the DEA that it has been doing this surveillance from, it says, 1999. Is the DEA saying to Jamaica struggling with one of the highest rates of gun crimes in the world that, for its own self-interest, based on the allegations, it would prefer to watch guns come into the island from its own shores than assist our police force in stopping their inflows?
Again, though, the charges are serious, at this stage they are still only allegations, but I suppose the DEA would respond by telling us that our problems are our own to be fixed while they have their end to protect. I couldn't fault the agency for that because, in that respect, we have failed miserably.
While rumours swirl, there are some realities to be faced. Jamaica is indeed overrun with guns. In recent times, the hotspots have been sections of Clarendon and communities on the outskirts of MoBay. So far, the west has been pretty quiet.
If the DEA has its way, what will be the result when a social explosion occurs? We who live here have to deal with these realities. At present, our security forces are stretched to the limit.
If civil unrest should result in our highly tribalised system, and it has the potential to be deployed islandwide, who will protect us then?
This matter calls for expert political leadership because, when all is said and done, we have to live here, whether it is paradise or a cesspit.
Prime Minister Golding is not, at this time, a man to be envied. But his problems are deeply intertwined with ours.
observemark@gmail.com
WIGNALL'S WORLD
Mark Wignall
Sunday, September 06, 2009
It is 9:00 am on Wednesday. There is peak-hour traffic, an annoyingly slow bumper-to-bumper movement, on the very busy Barbican Road. A 73-year-old man sits in his vehicle as it inches along. According to reports, a lone gunman on foot approaches the vehicle and the elderly man is peppered with bullets.
All week there have been reports of murders, especially in our urban, inner-city slums where children are growing up under trauma that will only make matters worse 10 years from now. Having become inured to daily reports of shooting deaths, we no longer cringe at the statistics or the details and the ferocity of the killings. We no longer recognise our personal trauma because, as a tool perhaps to maintain our sanity, we simply hold our heads straight, walk like robots through the social smog that this nation has become and pretend that the racing pulse beat is pure imagination.
Mired in more than our fair share of ignorance, the educated and intelligent political leadership has, over many years of practice, mastered the art of turning us on every five years, then spitting us out until our votes are needed in the next elections.
Violent crime is out of control, our political leaders are clueless, and our people have long forgotten that nebulous credo known as personal responsibility. We pay our politicians fairly well when all is added up, and it is known that some politicians pay themselves quite well too. The question is, have we identified that point where political leadership and personal responsibility meet on the graph? An even bigger question is, if we have decided that it is each man for himself and that we will go from day to day hearing nothing, seeing nothing, telling nothing, while our politicians have encapsulated themselves in their bubbles in the sky, does not that constitute sound reason for us to declare Jamaica a failed state?
And, of course, we are forced to ask once again, how did we come to this?
Let me relate to you a little story. In the 1990s I met a Jamaican businessman who was living and doing quite well for himself in the USA. He told me that in the 1980s after his business had met the level of success that he had envisioned and he had professionals running it, he felt a genuine urge to give back something to the country.
GOLDING... is not, at this time, a man to be enviedHe had had an affinity to one of our political parties and, through contacts, was able to convince the leadership to allow him to enter representational politics. After gaining the selection in a particular constituency, in the first week, he was all fired up about building up and rolling out his constituency organisation.
Word came to him a few days later that a team of men from the area wanted to sit down and talk with him about urgent matters affecting the constituency. He arranged a meeting. I don't remember the exact number of men who showed up, but it could have been four or five. The conversation went something like this: "Boss, di odda man dem have more gun dan wi and if wi nuh get more gun, wi cyaan win." One of the men opened a canvas bag and began to slowly remove the firearms they had carried with them. The new politician on the block almost fainted.
"I don't understand," he said. "I am not very comfortable with these matters."
One of the men who was the obvious leader said to him as he removed a slip of paper from his shirt pocket, "Boss, yu nuh haffi worry bout dem tings dey. We will deal wid dat." Then he began to read from the paper. It was a list of the number and types of guns needed. "We a leave dis wid you, boss. When yu deal wid it, jus call wi."
Within a month, he exited politics. Shortly after, he and his family emigrated.
The power, the glory and the sad reality
I have a friend, a solid PNP supporter, who tells me that 'good politician' is an oxymoron. I am at pains telling him that if we in this country continue to preach that all politicians are mixed up with gunmen, we will eventually wipe the landscape clean of decent politicians and accept only the dross and the dregs seeking power at all costs.
But let us call a spade a spade. It was the 'garrisonisation' of our politics which consummated the marriage of guns and politics. Power naturally floats towards power. Where the politician of the 1960s and 1970s was this godlike creature who had the power to issue state largesse to those with whom he found favour, the street elements gravitated towards him and he towards them.
Second, the politician saw the police force as house slaves, so the politician, the gunman and some senior policemen would find favour with one another.
If in the mix a community man was dealing in the illegal export of ganja to the USA and he wanted to grow his base, that druggist would also find reason to strike an alliance with the politician who was allied to the gunman and the crooked cops.
If an overly ambitious businessman wanted to move up fast and steal a little of the socioeconomic space controlled by the twenty-one families, he would donate to the politician who would drink liquor with the gunman who knew the crooked cops who protected the druggist. In time, in almost Orwellian fashion, it became difficult to differentiate between politician, gunman, crooked cop, druggist and businessman.
Power desires that all ends of the power spectrum operate in a closed/looped setting.
It is politically correct to assume that even though elements of those alliances still exist in our polity, there have been radical shifts in the spectrum. The politician is no longer the all-conquering earthly god.
Whereas in the earlier years he was able to supply funds to gunmen who were prepared to shed the blood of those who supported the other side, during the period of the 1980s the lines between gunman and druggist became blurred. A merger had taken place.
As the crooked cops, and the gunman/druggist grew tighter in their union, some of the businessmen who had dabbled heavily in the ganja trade of the 1970s outgrew the crude alliances. In the social whoosh which sounded, the politician found himself as the 'bwoy' in the picture.
Today, we laud the businessmen who made it through ganja runnings in the 1970s but hurl barbs at those who stick closer to the streets and the poorer among us.
But history tells us that those political strongmen who spent too much time fingering their umbilical attachments to politicians and seeking to be constantly fed from their dried-up teats met deaths which had striking similarities. It was almost as if the state was trying to redress the balance in the sick power spectrum.
The abandonment of the poor
Most of the rural poor who came to the capital city in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s ended up in ghettoes in the city and on the perimeter surrounding it. Their first dreams were a visa and a ticket to the land of opportunity.
When that failed to materialise, they crowded the city, as well as the outskirts, and that presented the politician with a logistical nightmare that he somehow turned into his opportunity. The magic word was HOUSING. Housing slums were razed and in their place housing garrisons were built.
As state resources were diverted to provide housing for these poor, often under-educated people, one would have had to be a monster to disagree with politicians as they rolled out these high-rises. It was, in the immediate instance, a win-win situation for the politician. One, he secured his political base for life. Two, he was shown to have love for the poor.
Third, where public commentators and social scientists had no answer to the immediate problems of the poor - lack of housing - all bought into the idea that before a poverty-stricken man could educate himself and go out looking for work, he needed to live somewhere.
What no one had a solution for was the irresponsible behaviour which would arise. After paying a few months' peppercorn mortgages most residents ceased all payment. At the same time, the politician turned a blind eye when the residents ceased paying for water supplies and, through community enforcers, JPS found itself on the dark outside, looking in at the free light burning at the expense of the law-abiding citizens.
As the state largesse dried up - after all, the politician could always say, "I gave you housing. What more do you want?" - many of these garrison residents found that the free housing still did not allow them to eat.
Into that social space walked the community enforcer, the community leader. These zones of exclusion where the vote was determined long before election day saw a sort of hands-off relationship between the political representative and the community leader.
He became the community government. In communities right across the island, the impotent politician found that his stock of political Viagra had been depleted.
In addition to contracts which would come from the state, the community leader opened legitimate businesses, funded families who fell on hard times, provided school fees and lunch money and instituted a justice system that, if seen, is a wonder and a shock to behold. It is crude and brutal, but it meets the needs of the community's residents as it keeps out rapists, robbers and those foolish enough to consider harming the elderly.
That is just a fact of Jamaica's present reality.
The case of Tivoli Gardens
There is just no way of avoiding the discussions which have arisen as a result of the US DEA claim that Tivoli Gardens don "Dudus" is a person of immediate interest to them. Like all who make commentary in the public space, I will express no views on his state of innocence or guilt. He has a competent lawyer in Tom Tavares-Finson.
I met Dudus nine years ago in Tivoli Gardens and must confess that I didn't expect it when someone said to me, "Come, I want a man like you to meet a certain someone." In the years prior to that I had been the harshest critic of Eddie Seaga, then MP for West Kingston. A party was being held in celebration of Seaga's birthday. As I approached the man, the person said to me, "This is the president."
I smiled somewhat because at that time, I had not yet heard of the 'president' accolade. We shook hands and then I walked away. Then I said to the person, "What is it with the president thing?" That's when he told me.
PNP supporters are alive with glee, and last Thursday one of them with whom I am familiar said to me, "Yu a pressure yu JLP party, but mi know sey a jus smokescreen dat." I laughed at him because if I should ever follow up every bit of ribbing I get every day, I would have no time for anything else.
My first observation was that the information package on Dudus from the US authorities was opened at just about the same time that Jamaica has signalled to the IMF and other international lending agencies that it is flat broke.
In the geo-political space, it appears that Jamaica is naked and being held over a barrel. The second and, in my mind, most important observation is that there has been an allegation made by the US authorities that they have been monitoring Dudus running guns.
Now, we have the word of the DEA that it has been doing this surveillance from, it says, 1999. Is the DEA saying to Jamaica struggling with one of the highest rates of gun crimes in the world that, for its own self-interest, based on the allegations, it would prefer to watch guns come into the island from its own shores than assist our police force in stopping their inflows?
Again, though, the charges are serious, at this stage they are still only allegations, but I suppose the DEA would respond by telling us that our problems are our own to be fixed while they have their end to protect. I couldn't fault the agency for that because, in that respect, we have failed miserably.
While rumours swirl, there are some realities to be faced. Jamaica is indeed overrun with guns. In recent times, the hotspots have been sections of Clarendon and communities on the outskirts of MoBay. So far, the west has been pretty quiet.
If the DEA has its way, what will be the result when a social explosion occurs? We who live here have to deal with these realities. At present, our security forces are stretched to the limit.
If civil unrest should result in our highly tribalised system, and it has the potential to be deployed islandwide, who will protect us then?
This matter calls for expert political leadership because, when all is said and done, we have to live here, whether it is paradise or a cesspit.
Prime Minister Golding is not, at this time, a man to be envied. But his problems are deeply intertwined with ours.
observemark@gmail.com
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