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While I dont agree with all, I like the overall direction.
A Jamaican agenda
Common SenseJohn Maxwell
Sunday, May 13, 2007
One of the penalties of being a critic of the system is that inevitably people want to know why you don't put forward your own plan to explain what you would do to correct the faults you see.
I have received lots of suggestions like this recently, so I have decided to accept the challenge. What would I do if I were prime minister of Jamaica?
I would begin by recognising that I am the property of the whole society and that I have a duty to provide leadership and inspiration for everyone.
I would call on the leader of the opposition to join me.
We would explain that the public interest, our interest, is based on the right of every person to the opportunity to make the best of herself/himself. We would explain that we need to emancipate ourselves from hopelessness, despair, and powerlessness by understanding that our destiny is in our own hands and that if we do not help ourselves, no one else will help us.
We would call on every Jamaican of every party, in Jamaica and abroad, to offer their talent and resources to the national effort to make Jamaica work. I would also make it plain that the Jamaican interest, the public interest, mandates that the resources of Jamaica must serve Jamaica first, that development is above all the development of the Jamaican person and the people who live in Jamaica, and that all external considerations must come after these essentials, the desiderata, are settled.
Putting people first
If I were the leader of this nation I would make sure that everybody understood what we need to do. I would ask those in positions of advantage to come together and think about how they could help the process of developing the people as a whole, how they could help by providing resources, including their own skills and brainpower, to stimulate peaceful and productive change.
The leader of the opposition and I would be equal partners in the leadership of this programme.
We would ask those who can volunteer assistance to do so, and we would set up an office to co-ordinate and aim this effort where it would do most good.
We would call upon the entire society to join in, the good and the bad, the pious and the lawbreakers, the communists and the capitalists, the heterosexuals and the homosexuals, the religious and the non-religious, the rich and the poor, the learned and the illiterate, the athletes and the physically handicapped, to discover within themselves the resources which they are prepared to offer to the larger society.
No one would be left out.
I would ask retired people to form advisory groups, to review and suggest improvements and corrections based on their experience, and I would encourage the children to help in whatever way they could, organising themselves, for instance, to bring comfort and assistance to the old, the indigent, and the forgotten.
I would ask people to help organise activities like scouting for boys and girls, teaching the children what is important in their environments and how to protect and enhance it. Our nation needs to ensure that all of us recognise ourselves as the owners of the society, that we all have a stake in everything, that the roads and the schools, the trees and the sea belong to us and are our responsibility to care.
Community responsibility
Most human beings, rich or poor, instinctively understand that we live in an interdependent world, a world in which all our interests are bound together, no matter how far apart we may live.
Most people understand, for instance, that the poverty, misery, and deprivation of those at the bottom have a strong correlation with the levels of stress, anxiety, anger and violence in the society. Most people realise that brute force begets only more violence and that if we are to live in a civilised, peaceful and safe society, we need to take all our interests to heart.
Most of us understand that every economic activity and every social activity is harmed by violence and that we could, as the World Bank points out, increase our gross domestic product and significantly reduce violence and crime, simply by making sure that all school-age children are in school and being properly instructed.
Every human being has his own ideas of what should be done to improve life, to satisfy the basic human needs.
So, I would start by defining the basic needs of my community, Jamaica. I would begin by finding out from every person, every man, woman and child in the society, what they think they need.
This is not as difficult an undertaking as it may seem, and the way to do it is in fact described in a document called Agenda 21, the Treaty of Rio, signed by the leaders of every nation in the world, including Jamaica, 14 years ago at the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
That document, which is now part of the law of every nation, explains how communities and nations should go about designing an Agenda for the 21st century. Agenda 21 is condensed in my book How to Make Our Own News, which is still available from the University Press.
The process is straightforward. We begin by asking every community to get together to compile a document describing their assets and their deficiencies. The government, of course, needs to provide kernels of assistance to the communities, giving them the basic blueprints of what needs to be done and explaining how they can organise their efforts.
There is in existence a document which does exactly this. It is called Local Sustainable Development Planning and was published some years ago by the NRCA with Canadian assistance under the ENACT programme. I confess to having edited this document so I am not entirely disinterested in recommending it, especially since it is the only one of its kind.
Communities would meet to energise and organise themselves, with help from the political parties, to begin a new programme for personal and national emancipation; to decide on a first, elementary programme of action to discover the real status of each community, to conduct a community audit.
Schoolchildren should be encouraged to take a leading part in this, mapping the community, finding out and documenting how many houses, churches, schools, playing fields, police stations, public services shops, offices, and other productive enterprises exist in the community. They would document the skills housed in the community, whether they are used or idle. They would then document the community deficiencies, whether the public services are efficient, whether water supplies are adequate, for instance.
These community audits would then be presented to community assemblies for discussion and action. The assemblies would select people for specific tasks: no one should have more than one leadership role because one of the aims of the exercise is to find and develop community leadership in depth.
When all the information is gathered, or after say, two months, the communities should meet, first locally, then regionally and nationally, to decide on priorities for action.
In all of this activity, the Government and its agencies would play no more than a supporting, facilitating role. The Opposition would be involved on the same terms, because what we want to produce is a plan to be implemented by whichever party is in office.
Water is life
Water is the foundation of all communities. Since community life depends on it, water must be under community control. This means that every activity, social, commercial, or industrial, must fit in with the needs of the community.
Under the Watersheds Protection Act, crafted by Norman Manley, there is provision for the country to be divided into water districts, which are local planning authorities in their own right. Local watershed authorities are the ideal basis for local development planning. In 1978, the NRCA, under my
chairmanship, decided to make all of Jamaica into one watershed and three years later that recommendation was signed into law by Edward Seaga, who had in the interim become prime minister.
Since this decision was a bipartisan one, it has one advantage over any other: no one party can claim it.
The idea that water can be privatised is a direct attack on human rights. If the owner of the Ocho Rios water supply decides that he would prefer to supply water to cruise ships and hotels rather than to the community, what recourse does the community have? The water supply is one area the market cannot decide.
Water is produced by the action and sacrifice of the state, the people. The money and sweat and sacrifice we have put into preserving our forests and protecting our hillsides are the only guarantees that our water supplies will exist. To put a merchant at the end of this pipe, collecting tribute from people he does not serve in any way, is repugnant to and against the public interest.
Decisions as to whether communities and people live or die cannot be left to bauxite companies or sugar manufacturers. Under community control, water supplies would no longer be contaminated and/or ruined by the dumping of 'dunder' into sinkholes or the dumping of sewage into gullies, wetlands, rivers or beaches.
A Jamaican agenda
Common SenseJohn Maxwell
Sunday, May 13, 2007
One of the penalties of being a critic of the system is that inevitably people want to know why you don't put forward your own plan to explain what you would do to correct the faults you see.
I have received lots of suggestions like this recently, so I have decided to accept the challenge. What would I do if I were prime minister of Jamaica?
I would begin by recognising that I am the property of the whole society and that I have a duty to provide leadership and inspiration for everyone.
I would call on the leader of the opposition to join me.
We would explain that the public interest, our interest, is based on the right of every person to the opportunity to make the best of herself/himself. We would explain that we need to emancipate ourselves from hopelessness, despair, and powerlessness by understanding that our destiny is in our own hands and that if we do not help ourselves, no one else will help us.
We would call on every Jamaican of every party, in Jamaica and abroad, to offer their talent and resources to the national effort to make Jamaica work. I would also make it plain that the Jamaican interest, the public interest, mandates that the resources of Jamaica must serve Jamaica first, that development is above all the development of the Jamaican person and the people who live in Jamaica, and that all external considerations must come after these essentials, the desiderata, are settled.
Putting people first
If I were the leader of this nation I would make sure that everybody understood what we need to do. I would ask those in positions of advantage to come together and think about how they could help the process of developing the people as a whole, how they could help by providing resources, including their own skills and brainpower, to stimulate peaceful and productive change.
The leader of the opposition and I would be equal partners in the leadership of this programme.
We would ask those who can volunteer assistance to do so, and we would set up an office to co-ordinate and aim this effort where it would do most good.
We would call upon the entire society to join in, the good and the bad, the pious and the lawbreakers, the communists and the capitalists, the heterosexuals and the homosexuals, the religious and the non-religious, the rich and the poor, the learned and the illiterate, the athletes and the physically handicapped, to discover within themselves the resources which they are prepared to offer to the larger society.
No one would be left out.
I would ask retired people to form advisory groups, to review and suggest improvements and corrections based on their experience, and I would encourage the children to help in whatever way they could, organising themselves, for instance, to bring comfort and assistance to the old, the indigent, and the forgotten.
I would ask people to help organise activities like scouting for boys and girls, teaching the children what is important in their environments and how to protect and enhance it. Our nation needs to ensure that all of us recognise ourselves as the owners of the society, that we all have a stake in everything, that the roads and the schools, the trees and the sea belong to us and are our responsibility to care.
Community responsibility
Most human beings, rich or poor, instinctively understand that we live in an interdependent world, a world in which all our interests are bound together, no matter how far apart we may live.
Most people understand, for instance, that the poverty, misery, and deprivation of those at the bottom have a strong correlation with the levels of stress, anxiety, anger and violence in the society. Most people realise that brute force begets only more violence and that if we are to live in a civilised, peaceful and safe society, we need to take all our interests to heart.
Most of us understand that every economic activity and every social activity is harmed by violence and that we could, as the World Bank points out, increase our gross domestic product and significantly reduce violence and crime, simply by making sure that all school-age children are in school and being properly instructed.
Every human being has his own ideas of what should be done to improve life, to satisfy the basic human needs.
So, I would start by defining the basic needs of my community, Jamaica. I would begin by finding out from every person, every man, woman and child in the society, what they think they need.
This is not as difficult an undertaking as it may seem, and the way to do it is in fact described in a document called Agenda 21, the Treaty of Rio, signed by the leaders of every nation in the world, including Jamaica, 14 years ago at the so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
That document, which is now part of the law of every nation, explains how communities and nations should go about designing an Agenda for the 21st century. Agenda 21 is condensed in my book How to Make Our Own News, which is still available from the University Press.
The process is straightforward. We begin by asking every community to get together to compile a document describing their assets and their deficiencies. The government, of course, needs to provide kernels of assistance to the communities, giving them the basic blueprints of what needs to be done and explaining how they can organise their efforts.
There is in existence a document which does exactly this. It is called Local Sustainable Development Planning and was published some years ago by the NRCA with Canadian assistance under the ENACT programme. I confess to having edited this document so I am not entirely disinterested in recommending it, especially since it is the only one of its kind.
Communities would meet to energise and organise themselves, with help from the political parties, to begin a new programme for personal and national emancipation; to decide on a first, elementary programme of action to discover the real status of each community, to conduct a community audit.
Schoolchildren should be encouraged to take a leading part in this, mapping the community, finding out and documenting how many houses, churches, schools, playing fields, police stations, public services shops, offices, and other productive enterprises exist in the community. They would document the skills housed in the community, whether they are used or idle. They would then document the community deficiencies, whether the public services are efficient, whether water supplies are adequate, for instance.
These community audits would then be presented to community assemblies for discussion and action. The assemblies would select people for specific tasks: no one should have more than one leadership role because one of the aims of the exercise is to find and develop community leadership in depth.
When all the information is gathered, or after say, two months, the communities should meet, first locally, then regionally and nationally, to decide on priorities for action.
In all of this activity, the Government and its agencies would play no more than a supporting, facilitating role. The Opposition would be involved on the same terms, because what we want to produce is a plan to be implemented by whichever party is in office.
Water is life
Water is the foundation of all communities. Since community life depends on it, water must be under community control. This means that every activity, social, commercial, or industrial, must fit in with the needs of the community.
Under the Watersheds Protection Act, crafted by Norman Manley, there is provision for the country to be divided into water districts, which are local planning authorities in their own right. Local watershed authorities are the ideal basis for local development planning. In 1978, the NRCA, under my
chairmanship, decided to make all of Jamaica into one watershed and three years later that recommendation was signed into law by Edward Seaga, who had in the interim become prime minister.
Since this decision was a bipartisan one, it has one advantage over any other: no one party can claim it.
The idea that water can be privatised is a direct attack on human rights. If the owner of the Ocho Rios water supply decides that he would prefer to supply water to cruise ships and hotels rather than to the community, what recourse does the community have? The water supply is one area the market cannot decide.
Water is produced by the action and sacrifice of the state, the people. The money and sweat and sacrifice we have put into preserving our forests and protecting our hillsides are the only guarantees that our water supplies will exist. To put a merchant at the end of this pipe, collecting tribute from people he does not serve in any way, is repugnant to and against the public interest.
Decisions as to whether communities and people live or die cannot be left to bauxite companies or sugar manufacturers. Under community control, water supplies would no longer be contaminated and/or ruined by the dumping of 'dunder' into sinkholes or the dumping of sewage into gullies, wetlands, rivers or beaches.
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