Seaga's mouth could be Golding's saviour Mark Wignall Thurs

[Sir X]

Seaga's mouth could be Golding's saviour
Mark Wignall

Thursday, June 03, 2010

It must have now dawned on many of us that age and experience do not necessarily guarantee that that most elusive of desires - wisdom - will come to us. In fact, it may sadly elude us for the entire span of our existence if we allow the clutter of bad-mindedness to walk with us by day and sleep with us at night.

Just ask Eddie Seaga, a man steeped in political bitterness and maybe more than a dose of envy. In the years following the JLP's defeat at the polls in February 1989 he was always convinced, even up to the time of his electoral redundancy in the general elections of 2002, that somehow, there was a last hurrah left in him.


SEAGA... can only do Golding good as his time warp allows him a moment’s arousal, if not a last hurrah



SEAGA... can only do Golding good as his time warp allows him a moment’s arousal, if not a last hurrah

1/1

In the years when I found reason to stridently criticise what I saw as his selfishness in denuding the JLP of anyone who dared to reveal ambitions of leadership, in locking down the leadership post as if the JLP was his pet poodle, and in having as his main ace-in-the-hole the "Tivoli enforcement" to remove the testicles of those men in the JLP who would dare challenge his many decrees, it came to a head in 1999 when Desmond McKenzie, then a baptised lackey of Seaga, led a JLP march on the Observer.

One of the demands coming out of the then neutered spokespersons was that the Observer should get rid of me because I had called Eddie Seaga a "stale bulla". Before the hapless Labourites gathered outside the gates of the Observer, the then chairman of the party, the late Ryan Peralto, egged on the crowd by describing my criticisms of Seaga as "journalistic terrorism".

Many young people may not know it, but Seaga is a firm believer in duppies, or if the minutiae of the moment demands it, spirits. In 1996, with a straight face he told me that there were three main spirits. He gave me their names - River Mumma, Water Boy and the other one escapes me now, but I can confirm that it was not Bruce Golding.

Recently aroused from his slumber to defend not just Tivoli residents, but to take a national swipe at the man who stole the thunder that was never his in 2007 - Bruce Golding - Seaga said the following incredible words a few days ago, "The criminals are not the people who have been killed, just innocent people leaving their houses. The armed forces shot every man they could find. This has made me very distraught." While I believe that some of the people killed were innocents caught up in the "war" between gunmen and members of the security forces, surely Seaga, a man who knows Tivoli in all its many dimensions, could have furnished us with an explanation as to where the criminals disappeared.

Did River Mumma and Water Boy and that other one whisk them away?
Fully awake, Seaga accused Golding, correctly to me, as not being up to the task of managing the post of prime minister, but went further to accuse the government as one steeped in widespread corruption.

Incredible!

This from a man who, when he was prime minister in 1984, drank beer (along with key members of his Cabinet) with Lester Lloyd "Jim Brown" Coke, the late father of Dudus, after "Brown" was freed of murder charges arising from the shooting deaths of eight men from Rema during a Tivoli attack on the impoverished JLP enclave in South St Andrew. It was Seaga's "Let bygones be bygones" response, because probably the lives of eight Rema men were not quite worth the life of one Tivoli don.

So, who killed those men? River Mumma? Water Boy?

One person in an online forum asked me, "The question is this, Mark: if Seaga was aware of this widespread corruption among the Golding grouping, why didn't he expose it before now?"

Important question, and one that I believe exposes not just Seaga's open bitterness, but quite probably strips bare his claim of patriotism and nationalism. If he is the guru as his sister Jean Anderson (who recently accused me of being "rude" to criticise him) believes he is and he had been observing this widespread corruption, why did he not rouse himself and awaken the nation to it before now?

To me it is simple. Seaga is locked in a Tivoli time warp a la Claudie "Jack" Massop, Bya Mitchell, Jim Brown. His time there slowed down after he proudly walked at the head of the funeral procession of Jim Brown in 1992 but came to a sudden halt in late 1994 when he placed the name of Dudus on a list of "troublemakers" and haughtily sent it to the police commissioner, then Col Trevor MacMillan. Tivoli is his Jamaica.

What was it that Dudus had done differently in 1994 from what his father (whom Seaga had described as a "protector" of the area) had done in the years prior to 1992? Don't ask Seaga, as aroused as he suddenly is. Ask River Mumma or Water Boy.

As the security forces increase the pressure on criminal elements in the KMA and farther afield, the popularity of it among a people cowering from fear may begin to rub off on Golding, even though many of us know that his actions were those of a man who was impelled by the pressure of the very corner into which he had backed himself. Seaga as a man who was never well liked can only do Golding good as the aged man's time warp allows him a moment's arousal if not a last hurrah.

I am still of the firm belief that although our security forces must be supported, it would be foolish of us to believe that the rogue element has been suddenly dissolved. Of course, some people become highly emotive over any criticism of them like this email reader who lashed me after my column of last Sunday.

"Mark, you are a very sad man that supports criminality. I had my doubts about you a very long time ago. All you write is crap. The police need to search your house for Dudus. You can't do better anyway as you were born and bred in Tivoli, the scum of the Jamaican society. The Observer needs to sack you as you are a security risk.

"Go and tell your beloved Seaga to $%#@ off back to his country and you can go with him too, you silly, sad man. I bet some of your relatives are state terrorists. I hope they were killed by the security forces. Tivoli needs to be demolished, not even the dogs that **************** upon the walls of Tivoli should have survived."

With views like that widely out there, there is no doubt in my mind that the lull in murders (because that's what it really is) has awakened the population to the possibilities of what could result from active police and military operations. However, if we believe that 47 guns recovered from the many thousands "locked down" for now means that we have arrived at the nirvana of our dreams, we need to wake up, not like Seaga, to a slumber of his dictatorial past, but to the reality that if we do not rapidly expand the economic base of this country and cease the destructive paternalistic relationships between parochial politicians and poor people in the garrisons, the lull may well turn out to be the calm before an even bigger storm.

observemark@gmail.

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/colum...aviour_7671027

[ReggaeMike]

Mark is a joker as usual. So last week when he wrote his column he claims "something went horribly wrong in Tivoli" because 73 were dead and only 4 or 6 guns recovered, but now that 47 guns have recovered, "we need to wake up"? Umm..hello? Is Mark really on drugs? They have now recovered 51 guns (almost half of them rifles) and over 10,000 rounds of ammunition. At the time Mark was writing the figure for the recovered ammunitions must have been 8-9,000. Last night one of the officers from the security forces last night mentioned the overlooked fact that each round of illegal ammunition could kill a person so this recovery may well have prevented (at least in the short term) 10,000 deaths. I wouldn't go that far given how prone many criminals are to shooting victims multiple times, but if we assume 6 bullets per victim then this recovery might have spared over 1,600 lives which is the number of lives that are now snuffed out in a given year.

Unlike that person who wrote that angry email to Mark I doubt his relatives are state terrorists, but there is no doubt that he is silly. I recall reading one of his columns where he was writing about these two young men whom he was trying to assist and at least one of them had a history of assaulting (and I think raping) women. Then the joker in all his wisdom is one day driving with his wife and daughter, sees the guy on the road and stops. So when talking to him, the guy (now with his head in the window) leers at his wife and daughter and mentions how good they look (and thus naturally scaring the daylights out of them). He apparently went back by himself and cussed the guy the out, but which idiot is going to let a man with a history of assaulting women get a good look at his wife and daughter? That's extremely irresponsible and he would have nobody but himself to blame if he one day came home to find both of them had been raped by this man. Even without being raped, what kind of psychological damage has he exposed his daughter to?

And all this because he likes to stand up for the less fortunate? And likes to present all of them, regardless of what they have done, in a sympathetic light? I think Mark would get a lot more respect if he learned not to suspend his distinction between right and wrong when it comes to people living below a certain standard. The amazing thing is that the more he writes about those who are poor (or rather "poor" in the case of some, since some people were promised J$10,000 to J$100,000 a day in the conflict to defend Coke and those that received that money (especially the $100,000 a day) are not poor anymore) but who do things that are clearly wrong such as assaulting women, shooting at the police (like the fellow in his last column who shot at the soldiers and police and then hid in the May Pen cemetery and expressed regret at not shooting more) or steal, then the more average, law-abiding readers will think that Mark does support criminality and the more the average reader will think that just about everybody who lives below a certain standard-of-living is nothing better than a criminal or a potential criminal.

In fact I've yet to recall Mark writing about those who are poor and are victims other than those who are victims of police abuse. For instance he writes about a young man who assaulted women but when was the last time he chronicled the stories about the very types of women that such a man would have assaulted or who were actually assaulted? Surely all of them couldn't have been rich and therefore not worth the ink? What about those prostitutes who I'm sure most get abused sometimes? Or the young inner-city children, of whom at least some must have had bad experiences at the hands of their elders (both poor and rich, civilian and police)?

So Mark thinks that even after these finds we should still steadfastly focus on the rogue elements of the security forces and wake up to the fact active police and military operations are apparently pointless in his view? He must be on coke (maybe both kinds at that), because if there were more unhindered active police and military operations that recovered as many rounds of ammunition and arms as these then surely it should obvious that the economic base of the country could rapidly expand so as to get rid of the conditions which allow criminality to thrive? If say the police and the soldiers did this across 8 garrisons and maybe half-a-dozen other non-garrison settlements (but areas in which criminality is high) and they recovered 10,000 rounds and 50 guns in each case they would have recovered 140,000 rounds of ammo and 700 guns. That might allow normal society the kind of lull it needs in order to raise productivity and lower costs (remember how extortionists were absent from the downtown shopping areas after the police/military operation into Tivoli?) which can allow for economic growth. If Mark believes that attempting expand the economic base in an environment where criminals are free to act as leeches on society will enable successful economic expansion and reduce criminality then he must be indeed be high on some addictive substance.