Public Affairs - A crisis of apathy and distrust

Colin Steer, Sunday  Gleaner Editor

There's a humorous story told of a woman who was in her room praying when a relative knocked on her door to announce that someone was at her gate to see her. She got up, attended to the visitor, went back to her room, and resumed her position to address the Almighty with the familiarity of neighbourhood gossip, "Yes, Lord, as we were saying ... ."

Well, with the People's National Party (PNP) being re-elected to Government in less than five years after an amazing 18 and a half-year run, characterised in the main by economic malaise and social dysfunction, will it be a case of picking up where they left off, or is there any evidence that in the brief stint in Opposition, they have had cause to re-examine how they approached governance? The evidence is slim.

The past four years have mainly been a continuous stream of campaigning - from dual-citizenship court battles, to by-elections, to islandwide tours to force the Government to resign. The strategy has worked, but what comes next? And if it is true that a good definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over with the expectation of obtaining a different and better outcome, the ringing endorsement from the 28 per cent of those who bothered to vote for the PNP last Thursday suggests that a good part of the Jamaican voting population still does not mind travelling the same road repeatedly. But then again, perhaps there is a method to the madness.

Of course, considering the enthusiasm and arrogance with which the just-rejected Jamaica Labour Party Government set out to outperform its predecessors in scandals, one must conclude that there was an even greater degree of insanity within that party and the administration that it formed. With reference to the September 2007 polls, I wrote in 'Ugly wins, ugly losers', published two days after they were held, that from some perspectives, the JLP could be seen as the bigger losers given that they had outspent and outadvertised their opponents who had shown signs of being a tired, spent force after 18 years in office. Yet they could only manage to sneak home by a slim and disputed four-seat majority and 3,000 plus of the popular vote.

No honeymoon

In suggesting that the JLP and its leader did not have the political capital to engage in petty recriminations and needed to walk carefully through the raindrops, I also wrote:

"There will be no honeymoon. At the national level, Bruce Golding will be faced with a deficit in the love and admiration department. Many people will not be prepared to be patient with him, especially given the promises on the election trail. Long before the PNP has regrouped, there will be sniper shots directed at the new Government, not the least from sections of the media. They will have to keep their heads down and govern with a sense of purpose that the national good is paramount, and not just electoral victories."

Yet, the JLP seemed to have learnt little from its foray in 2007. At that time, big crowds of mostly young people followed their caravans across hills and valleys. Come election day, they barely managed to eke out a win. Four and a half years later, after lurching from self-made crisis to crisis, they were suddenly buoyed by a massive conference crowd but seemingly failed to appreciate the deep disconnect with the 'real voting populace'. They were clueless that insufficient on-the-ground work to ensure that these rented crowds were actually enumerated and sufficiently motivated to go out and vote would not yield the desired results! Generation 2000 (G2K) had smartphones, but little smarts.

They are now back in familiar territory, on the opposition benches. There is much blame to spread around, but after the personal recriminations and cussing out etc, what's next?

If the JLP is to be relevant, it will have to determine what overarching philosophy will guide its operations and what it wants to achieve when given the responsibility to govern. It cannot be just about being anti-PNP and whatever it claims to represent. It may well be true that many in the Jamaican population are still yearning for the rancid milk of 1970s socialism, but what credible alternative does the JLP have to offer?

How does it hope to engage with the population and what principles will govern its actions as a party in Opposition preparing for a possible political comeback?

Yes, former leader Bruce Golding was severely damaged goods, but his forced exit by internal and external power brokers, the cynical attempt to manipulate voters in the premature anointing of Andrew Holness, and the searing ambition of others being put on hold were all too apparent to many people. To add insult to injury, there was the party's full embrace of the quite dishonest Sharon Hay-Webster, against whom it had railed for her dual-citizenship status, having had to contend with similar challenges of its own members earlier.

Hay-Webster, a 'rock-stone' second-generation Comrade, shed her orange garb for green in a desperate lunge to save her political skin. And the public was just expected to hug this up and carry along swimmingly. Puss and dog don't have the same luck. In the circumstances, Hay-Webster could not do for the JLP what Abe Dabdoub and others have done before for the PNP by switching political allegiance and then throwing mud at their erstwhile colleagues.

But the JLP naïvely or cynically thought she was a feather in its cap. The party would not have won the East St Catherine seat by any means, but it should at least have had the decency to allow someone else to be its standard-bearer in that constituency.

Expectations

But what does the non-voting population now expect of politicians and the political process over the next four to five years and beyond? Will the so-called coalition of civil society, church groups which found their voices after the self-imposed silence of previous years and councils of eminent (and apparently wise) persons who emerged to pontificate on dual citizenship, crime, corruption, and campaign-finance reform still find reason to play a watchdog role?

Corruption has loomed as a big area of concern over the last two election cycles. How will this be effectively cauterised? With the contract of the crusading Greg Christie set to expire later this year and his indicating that he intends to move on, except he is wooed into staying with powers of a super corruption prosecutor, a new contractor general is set to assume office.

Christie had no monopoly on integrity or desire for probity in public life, but given the zeal with which he was attacked by the previous PNP administration and later by some JLP personnel, we can be sure that his replacement will be easily found and carefully selected. How much continuous support will 'civil society' give to his replacement?

For now, the PNP can govern with a comfortable working majority, even though elected by less than a third of the electorate. It's amazing, really, that Jamaica could have a general election in which only 52.65 per cent of registered voters participated. If you take into consideration that thousands of voting-age Jamaicans have chosen not to even be enumerated, this underscores the real crisis of apathy on the part of would-be voters and the distrust of the political representatives. And the fact that there is no rigid ideological divide between the parties has significantly dampened fervour.

Years of manipulation have resulted in a harvest of dysfunction. How well we are able to escape this quagmire depends as much on the governed perhaps even more than the governors.

Colin Steer is editor of The Sunday Gleaner. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and colin.steer@gleanerjm.com.