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EDITORIAL - Politicians playing with matches
Published: Friday | July 23, 2010 0 Comments and 0 Reactions
There is that adage about children playing with matches: if allowed, they might just burn the house down, or cause serious damage to themselves and others.
That's the vision left by Jamaica's political leaders with their antics this week over the state of emergency - of a bunch of self-willed juveniles, ready to tear down the edifice, so long as it deprived their rivals of advantage and/or glory. The shame of this latest let-down is that it happened just when we dared to hope, based on evidence from the recent past, that the country's political process was escaping its arrested development and just might be heading to maturity.
As it now stands - after one side wallowed in populism and then pandered to the lumpen and the other abrogated its responsibility to lead in exchange for advantage in a cynical political manoeuvre - the state of emergency has collapsed.
In the event, Jamaica's security forces have had real cause to feel abandoned and betrayed when their reasonable appeal for a 30-day extension of emergency powers was transformed into the juvenile match-striking contest witnessed in the Parliament, and subsequently and callously dismissed.
Wishful thinking
Hopefully, the gains of the past two months - a one-fifth month-on-month decline in homicides in June and by nearly a half in July - will survive this forced and hurried dismantling of the state of emergency, and with it the possible return of the hard men of criminality to the communities they used to control and to, perhaps, their murderous ways.
Whatever happens on the criminal front - and it is a fallacy to believe that the threat to the Jamaican state has passed - the events of this week underlined certain inadequacies in Jamaica, not least of which is the incompetence of the political class, in whom we have entrusted the management of the country.
In Gordon House they displayed poor judgement and utter recklessness. Were they in a situation of accountability they all would have been fired.
New approach
Moreover, the debacle over the state of emergency highlights, as this newspaper and others have insisted, the need for a new approach to politics and governance: there must be some things around which there can be a broad consensus and, therefore, removed from narrow, partisan bickering. These issues must include, but not be limited to, national security.
Two things, however, must be in place for this to happen. One of these must be organised fora, including parliamentary committees, for dialogue and discourse among the political parties and the wider public on national issues. Many of the issues over which the parties bickered on Tuesday might have been settled at, if necessary, even a closed-door session of a House committee, at which the heads of the security forces would testify.
But more important is the need for a strong, mature and visionary political leadership
unencumbered by baggage of 'garrison' and 'dons', and where the notion rests on the partisan distribution of spoils which, unfortunately, is lacking in both parties.
Jamaicans, constitutionally, next go to the polls in two years' time. Maybe by then we will have a new breed of trusted, mature and younger leaders.
EDITORIAL - Politicians playing with matches
Published: Friday | July 23, 2010 0 Comments and 0 Reactions
There is that adage about children playing with matches: if allowed, they might just burn the house down, or cause serious damage to themselves and others.
That's the vision left by Jamaica's political leaders with their antics this week over the state of emergency - of a bunch of self-willed juveniles, ready to tear down the edifice, so long as it deprived their rivals of advantage and/or glory. The shame of this latest let-down is that it happened just when we dared to hope, based on evidence from the recent past, that the country's political process was escaping its arrested development and just might be heading to maturity.
As it now stands - after one side wallowed in populism and then pandered to the lumpen and the other abrogated its responsibility to lead in exchange for advantage in a cynical political manoeuvre - the state of emergency has collapsed.
In the event, Jamaica's security forces have had real cause to feel abandoned and betrayed when their reasonable appeal for a 30-day extension of emergency powers was transformed into the juvenile match-striking contest witnessed in the Parliament, and subsequently and callously dismissed.
Wishful thinking
Hopefully, the gains of the past two months - a one-fifth month-on-month decline in homicides in June and by nearly a half in July - will survive this forced and hurried dismantling of the state of emergency, and with it the possible return of the hard men of criminality to the communities they used to control and to, perhaps, their murderous ways.
Whatever happens on the criminal front - and it is a fallacy to believe that the threat to the Jamaican state has passed - the events of this week underlined certain inadequacies in Jamaica, not least of which is the incompetence of the political class, in whom we have entrusted the management of the country.
In Gordon House they displayed poor judgement and utter recklessness. Were they in a situation of accountability they all would have been fired.
New approach
Moreover, the debacle over the state of emergency highlights, as this newspaper and others have insisted, the need for a new approach to politics and governance: there must be some things around which there can be a broad consensus and, therefore, removed from narrow, partisan bickering. These issues must include, but not be limited to, national security.
Two things, however, must be in place for this to happen. One of these must be organised fora, including parliamentary committees, for dialogue and discourse among the political parties and the wider public on national issues. Many of the issues over which the parties bickered on Tuesday might have been settled at, if necessary, even a closed-door session of a House committee, at which the heads of the security forces would testify.
But more important is the need for a strong, mature and visionary political leadership
unencumbered by baggage of 'garrison' and 'dons', and where the notion rests on the partisan distribution of spoils which, unfortunately, is lacking in both parties.
Jamaicans, constitutionally, next go to the polls in two years' time. Maybe by then we will have a new breed of trusted, mature and younger leaders.
