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Is like di breddah ah read mi post dem......Bruce...dun wid di ineffectual tinkering!! Time for a New Paradigm in leadership...whey yuh fraid fah??Golden opportunity for transformational leadership
Published: Sunday | September 27, 2009
Bruce Golding has come with a great deal of baggage, ranging from his rumoured weak performance at Mona to being the only Jamaican politician to have represented two garrison constituencies, one of which he built for himself in Central St Catherine.
There have been few better moments than now for the systemic transformation of Jamaican society and economy
. In fact, I think there are only two comparable moments since Independence: the Independence moment itself and the onset of the Michael Manley administration of 1972-1980, both of which were badly blown. Now has some distinct advantages over then
. We are in the midst of a globally challenging period such as has not been seen in eight decades. And the crisis is bursting with opportunities. The euphoria of 1962 and 1972 is absent, which is a good thing. The population has the harsh experience of the mistakes made, the promises broken, and the hopes unrealised, and has far greater political maturity and moderation than at any other time since Independence. What we want now is bold transformational leadership
, not the timorous, technocratic plodding that the Bruce Golding government has been up to. in no mood for administration change
There are a number of things in favour of the Government. Despite the narrow margin of victory on September 3, 2007, and the noisy antics
of the Opposition since then, the people are in no mood whatsoever for a change of administration. They have consistently reconfirmed their choice of leadership for now in the by-elections which delivered widened margins of victory over 2007. The leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), now prime minister, correctly read the narrow margin victory of 2007 as a call - indeed, a cry - from the people for political collaboration in the national interest
. Our fractious, tribalistic politics, especially the bloody Manley/Seaga years, is the single biggest cause of our major national problems . Bruce Golding walked away from that politics and as founder/leader of the National Democratic Movement promised a "new and different" politics. He must not expect a better time than now. The country is firmly wedged between a rock and a hard place, but has quietly chosen not to explode into civil unrest and disorder
. While many other countries have had economic crisis riots we have only kept up our murderous ways in killing more than a thousand and a half citizens each year with no civil explosion. The country has quietly absorbed an increased gas tax, something which has not happened since the 1980s . The return to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which at a different moment could have excited protest, is widely lamented but also quietly understood as a necessity forced upon us, not by the incompetence of the Government but by long-standing domestic problems exacerbated by the global economic crisis. But the greatest asset which the Government has for pushing deep transformative change is its leader. Bruce Golding has come to the Office of Prime Minister with a great deal of baggage, ranging from his rumoured weak performance at Mona
to being the only Jamaican politician to have represented two garrison constituencies , one of which he built for himself in Central St Catherine , and with the don of the current one caught up in a painfully slow extradition process which has to be the greatest embarrassment to the Government since taking office. And the greatest challenge to its credibility. Golding's reputation for flip-flopping is real but has not seriously stuck or done him great damage.
His stint as construction minister in the Seaga Government with responsibility for both housing and public works contributed, by his own admission, to garrisonisation and the deepening of political tribalisation
, out of which so many people have suffered and died. But his political accusers have no cleaner hands and are mostly sensibly quiet. The country is sombrely open to Golding's atonement through transformational leadership. The polls data, when all the analyses are over and done, are solidly indicating national support for Golding in the Office of the Prime Minister, despite substantial dissatisfaction with the Government at large. The feeling is widespread that, under the circumstances and all things considered, Golding is the best man for the job.
What Golding will do with that trust and confidence in the (little) time he has is the $561.4 billion question. The moment beckons the man to rise to the stature of a Franklin Delano Roosevelt or a Winston Churchill on a Jamaican scale of things.
(A reprise of Norman Manley will suffice)
Tinkering with the economy and with social problems, with four eyes fastened on the next election, will not cut it
. Now requires radical transformational leadership . And 'now' won't last forever. The Budget reworking exercise now under way (we can't call it the Budget-cutting exercise again) should focus the Government on the really fundamental question: 'what is this government about'?
The old technocratic focus on the economy is the wrong focus
. Economies grow when they are nurtured by non- economic factors . The Government should read Adam Smith's enquiry into the Wealth of Nations. I suggest a small set of transformative interlocking foci.
No need to read Adam Smith...read Joseph Stiglitz or Paul Krugman or Thomas Friedman.
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