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Empowering people: key to dismantling garrisons
Published: Tuesday | June 8, 2010 Ruel Cooke, Contributor
THE BABEL coming out of the babble since the events of Labour Day, prescribing solutions to our political crisis, ranges from a quasi-military solution to the problem of crime and violence, to cleansing the political deck and replacing the politicians with (not yet corrupted, but soon to be) young politicians, to strengthening the hand of 'civil society' to exercise control over the political system.
Those genuinely interested in political transformation, the current buzzword, need to understand the nature of "political clientelism" and its root in economic deprivation. The person who coined the term, the late Professor Carl Stone, uses it in his book, Democracy and Clientelism in Jamaica, to describe a system where politicians "privatise" state benefits such as housing and employment and build a clientele of electoral support among the poor. In Electoral Support and Public Opinion in Jamaica, Stone explains that this is the device used by governments to gain mass support for policies and programmes which serve primarily middle-class and upper-class interests.
Based on this definition of the problem which has now blown up in our faces, the simple truth is that the politicians and leaders of civil society, whose interests are served by political clientelism, should not be expected to dismantle the system, no matter how sincere their protestations of concern.
They may dismantle the garrisons which they have wittingly or unwittingly put in place to preserve their power (with unavoidable wanton destruction of life and property) but they will have to replace it with a more direct and repressive system of "law and order" - unless they are prepared to share some of their power with those who are deprived of it.
Garrisons are necessary
Our middle-class intellectuals will never be able to fathom the truth that garrisons are necessary for the preservation of the prevailing economic and social order. Speaking of a few garrison constituencies is a gross oversimplification of the problem. Our system dictates that there be an ever-increasing number of garrison communities of the urban poor of both stripes (green or orange) within constituencies.
Jamaica's modern political system came into being as a result of the struggle of the poor around our first Labour Day in 1938 to change our economic system by any means necessary so that they could have a share of the economic cake. Ever since being given the power by the British to share up this cake, our political leaders took the decision to share only that portion of the cake that its foreign and local owners were prepared to give up to preserve social peace. There just wasn't enough to go around.
Our politics thus became a struggle among warring tribes for state benefits. Those who had would have to be depended on to keep those who had not under heavy manners. And so Tivoli was born as the first institutionalisation of this system into political garrison enclaves strong enough to preserve the political one order throughout the entire constituency. Many other enclaves were subsequently built on both sides of the political divide.
The birth of donmanship
Enter the don and his (masculine) system of donmanship. The don emerged out of and eventually replaced the community youth clubs into which the corner crews were organised in the 1970s.
When those who monopolised power in the land refused to empower these and other community organisations, their desperate leaders sought, in the 1980s, to empower themselves by seeking the voluntary payment of 'survival taxes' (extortion) by the owners of businesses operating within their respective communities.
Since the authority of the democratic community structures were not recognised and legally enshrined by the state, their authority had to be imposed through 'badness' - the rule of benevolent terrorism of the don.
The disempowerment of the don can only be effected by the empowerment of the democratically evolved community organisations.
Effective empowerment means the politicians ceding the power to dispense state benefits (less, not more, MP-dispensed Constituency Development Funds);
it means the people, through their democratic community structures, being given and accepting the responsibility for the productive utilisation and development of idle or underutilised human and physical resources within the borders of their community (including land);
it means the people taking responsibility themselves for the security, welfare and development of their community and not depending on the benevolence of occupying external forces (including the state);
and it means the Government accepting its new role to be that of strengthening of the democratic authority of the community structures and the economic and social empowerment of all its citizens -
(which cannot happen under the imposed regime of financial control by the globalising power of the International Monetary Fund).
Published: Tuesday | June 8, 2010 Ruel Cooke, Contributor
THE BABEL coming out of the babble since the events of Labour Day, prescribing solutions to our political crisis, ranges from a quasi-military solution to the problem of crime and violence, to cleansing the political deck and replacing the politicians with (not yet corrupted, but soon to be) young politicians, to strengthening the hand of 'civil society' to exercise control over the political system.
Those genuinely interested in political transformation, the current buzzword, need to understand the nature of "political clientelism" and its root in economic deprivation. The person who coined the term, the late Professor Carl Stone, uses it in his book, Democracy and Clientelism in Jamaica, to describe a system where politicians "privatise" state benefits such as housing and employment and build a clientele of electoral support among the poor. In Electoral Support and Public Opinion in Jamaica, Stone explains that this is the device used by governments to gain mass support for policies and programmes which serve primarily middle-class and upper-class interests.
Based on this definition of the problem which has now blown up in our faces, the simple truth is that the politicians and leaders of civil society, whose interests are served by political clientelism, should not be expected to dismantle the system, no matter how sincere their protestations of concern.
They may dismantle the garrisons which they have wittingly or unwittingly put in place to preserve their power (with unavoidable wanton destruction of life and property) but they will have to replace it with a more direct and repressive system of "law and order" - unless they are prepared to share some of their power with those who are deprived of it.
Garrisons are necessary
Our middle-class intellectuals will never be able to fathom the truth that garrisons are necessary for the preservation of the prevailing economic and social order. Speaking of a few garrison constituencies is a gross oversimplification of the problem. Our system dictates that there be an ever-increasing number of garrison communities of the urban poor of both stripes (green or orange) within constituencies.
Jamaica's modern political system came into being as a result of the struggle of the poor around our first Labour Day in 1938 to change our economic system by any means necessary so that they could have a share of the economic cake. Ever since being given the power by the British to share up this cake, our political leaders took the decision to share only that portion of the cake that its foreign and local owners were prepared to give up to preserve social peace. There just wasn't enough to go around.
Our politics thus became a struggle among warring tribes for state benefits. Those who had would have to be depended on to keep those who had not under heavy manners. And so Tivoli was born as the first institutionalisation of this system into political garrison enclaves strong enough to preserve the political one order throughout the entire constituency. Many other enclaves were subsequently built on both sides of the political divide.
The birth of donmanship
Enter the don and his (masculine) system of donmanship. The don emerged out of and eventually replaced the community youth clubs into which the corner crews were organised in the 1970s.
When those who monopolised power in the land refused to empower these and other community organisations, their desperate leaders sought, in the 1980s, to empower themselves by seeking the voluntary payment of 'survival taxes' (extortion) by the owners of businesses operating within their respective communities.
Since the authority of the democratic community structures were not recognised and legally enshrined by the state, their authority had to be imposed through 'badness' - the rule of benevolent terrorism of the don.
The disempowerment of the don can only be effected by the empowerment of the democratically evolved community organisations.
Effective empowerment means the politicians ceding the power to dispense state benefits (less, not more, MP-dispensed Constituency Development Funds);
it means the people, through their democratic community structures, being given and accepting the responsibility for the productive utilisation and development of idle or underutilised human and physical resources within the borders of their community (including land);
it means the people taking responsibility themselves for the security, welfare and development of their community and not depending on the benevolence of occupying external forces (including the state);
and it means the Government accepting its new role to be that of strengthening of the democratic authority of the community structures and the economic and social empowerment of all its citizens -
(which cannot happen under the imposed regime of financial control by the globalising power of the International Monetary Fund).
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