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EDITORIAL - Mr Golding mounts his nag
Published: Tuesday | August 31, 2010 5 Comments and 0 Reactions
Despite his new tactic of training his cannons on the messenger, Prime Minister Bruce Golding, in his reflective moments, understands clearly the crass disingenuity of his latest strategy.
For Mr Golding, more than any other politician in the country, should appreciate why Jamaicans remain disturbed, angry even, over their Government's behaviour in the Christopher Coke-Manatt affair and continue to demand the unvarnished truth from their leader.
After all, it is Mr Golding who, particularly in that heady seven-year period up to 2002, used to inveigh against eroding decency in governance and pledged to steer Jamaica away from a path that led only to its failure as a liberal democratic state.
By the time Mr Golding returned to, and became leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), and ultimately prime minister of Jamaica, he had himself established the bar for governance by which he would be judged. And it is from this vantage point that many Jamaicans now view this caricature of their prime minister
, mounted on a nag and off tilting at windmills.
In unprecedented behaviour by the Jamaican state, the Golding administration for nearly a year haggled with the United States
(US) and stalled Washington's attempt to extradite Coke, who the Americans accused of smuggling narcotics into their country and guns into Jamaica. Coke was close to the JLP and a power broker in Mr Golding's West Kingston parliamentary constituency.
Matters went further. A US law-lobby firm, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, was engaged to persuade the Americans to drop the extradition request for Coke, or to go soft on Jamaica in the dispute over the matter. Manatt insists it operated on behalf of the Jamaican government, which the administration says was not the case.
After initially feigning ignorance of the matter, Mr Golding admitted to sanctioning its hiring, but in his role as leader of the JLP, not as prime minister. Mr Golding apologised over the matter and claimed that his instructions were exceeded.
That explanation might have been all right when it could be claimed that Manatt's relationship was primarily with the political members of the executive and the JLP fixer and lawyer, Harold Brady. But as the emails recently obtained by this newspaper under the Access to Information Act revealed, two senior civil servants, the solicitor general, Douglas Leys, and one of his deputies, Lackston Robinson, were central to the relationship with Manatt.
Interventions
Indeed, Manatt provided Douglas Leys with draft letters for interventions with the US Justice Department and prepared proposed public statements for the Jamaican government on the Coke extradition matter.
Mr Golding implies that he did not know any of this which, if true, is perhaps because he wanted plausible deniability. That, however, does not vindicate the prime minister of moral responsibility for the affair or extricate him from his obligation to give the Jamaicans all the facts.
Indeed, despite the murkiness and obfuscation that have attended the Manatt-Coke issue, the quixotic Mr Golding seeks to make the press the villain and to impute motive for their demand for clarity; that they are engaged in partisan political motive.
There is a sense of déjà vu about it all, of 30 years ago, when another set of Don Quixotes stood on the backs of trucks and promised "next time, next time". The sense of grievances, nags and windmills seem to go nowhere.
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