How political parties have hurt Ja

Martin Henry

The governor of the BOJ and the director general of the PIOJ, magnifying glass in hand like Sherlock Holmes, are on their knees scratching about seeking to detect economic growth.

With their backs firmly turned upon the informal economy, Wynter and Bullock have been able to spot only a suspicious 0.6 per cent growth for the last quarter of July to September and are warning us not to expect more anytime soon.

As the growth detectives labour to spot even the most statistically insignificant sign of growth, so do the crime detectives to count bodies, a task at which the police absolutely excel.

The Half-Way Tree Transport Centre, the largest and busiest in the country and controlled by out-of-control schoolers, has become a metaphor for the social disorder which has engulfed Jamaica for so long that these youngsters have not known anything else.

And tomorrow, the Supreme Court is to rule on the constitutionality of the actions of a transformational leader to eject his 'enemies' from the Senate, the Upper House of the Parliament, through letters of resignation demanded and supplied at appointment for such a time as this.

If nothing else, the supremacy of the political party rises to the fore. Would the PNP confirm or deny that a similar, although more quietly executed, request was made for government senators to resign after the 2006 leadership race, a request which was resisted with the complicity of the messenger himself?

Everything's connected. A cow chain which ties up these observations together and tethers the country from making better progress is our brand of party politics from the 1940s. I have written a lot about this. Events of the last couple of weeks suggest it's time again.

Let's immediately concede that the PNP and JLP have made significant contributions to Jamaica's development. But this must not sideline a frank and fair analysis of their negative contributions.

In any case, as I have often pointed out in this column, the rising tide lifts all ships. Much of what has happened on the good side for Jamaica has simply been the result of the upswing in 'development' that has taken place across the world as a product of modernisation driven by technological advancement. Trends in the UNDP Human Development Index from 1980 to 2012, for example, are showing a steady rise in the global average HDI (expressed as a fraction of 1) from 0.561 to 0.694. Jamaica has kept ahead of the world average rising from 0.612 to 0.730 over the same period.

What is interesting - and in need of explanation - is that Jamaica was well ahead of the average HDI for the Latin America and Caribbean region in 1980, according to the UNDP, but has ended up at the same level as the regional average for 2012.

holding back Jamaica

Bad, destructive politics has set back the country. We want to consider crime, the economy, social order, and constitutional governance.

Murders are again on the rise after a short period of decline recently which disturbed the relentless surge in homicides since Independence. Of the 1,056 murders committed between January 1 and November 17, seventy-eight per cent were gang-related, with some 82 per cent of these murders being carried out by the gun or by gun and knife combined.

But 'Killers roam free', this newspaper reported last Wednesday, as nine out of every 10 murderers go unpunished. And the police are reporting signs of gangs linking up across traditional political loyalties.

It is not the linking up which matters today but the fact that gangs of political loyalists have been embedded in political strongholds, aka garrisons, almost from the start of the political parties. They became deeply entwined with both the politics and the community. They were armed as political enforcers and have become community providers in the economic wastelands which their very dominance has created.

I again call upon one of the many formal studies of the situation, Obika Gray's Demeaned but Empowered - The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica. In discussing the "fateful alliance", Gray wrote: "... The use of violence as a political tactic to win elections, defend political territory against rivals, and secure representation of workers in the trade union movement actually began in the 1940s, and not in the 1960s, as some observers have been wont to believe. Thus, from the moment Jamaicans won the right to vote, and native politicians got the opportunity to become incumbents of state power, political violence ... became an organising feature of Jamaican politics. This violent outlawry, driven by war over political spoils, was actively abetted and often spearheaded by top politicians of the day and their political organisations."

This is not merely academic stuff. Political tribalism and violence fed common criminality, devastated communities, and set back an entire country until today.

Crime has definitely taken its toll on the economy. But the fiscal recklessness of successive governments formed by the JLP and the PNP has wreaked its own extensive disaster. The Jamaican dollar has been allowed to depreciate from parity with the US dollar at conversion in 1969 and greater strength in the early 1970s to 105:1 now. Under IMF supervision, we are now seeking to wring out of the economy in a series of reform programmes hobbling deficiencies which have been allowed to accumulate.

The weak formal economy has not been able to absorb even the relatively few who have benefited from the country's investment in higher education and training. Thank God for migration which takes 80 per cent of tertiary graduates.

Unemployment is now running at 16 per cent, a 13-year high, and has never been driven down to single digit. The alliance of the political parties and their trade union wings have helped to block the modernisation of the economy in the name of protecting low-skilled, low-paying jobs.

Sugar and bananas, with their above-world average production costs in old, inefficient, low-tech systems, long protected by preferential access to the European market, are no longer viable industries.

backwardness

Right alongside elements of modernity, the bulk of the labour force remains unskilled. Underemployed marginal hustlers, trapped in backwardness and poverty, are products of our politics more than anything else.

And the country is mired in social disorder, chaos, crudeness and crassness hard to find anywhere else in the world. Obika Gray's book has a potent explanatory chapter linking 'Crime, Politics and Moral Culture'. In it, he says, "appeals for adherence to law and calls for a return to civic morality ... went largely unheeded as political rivalries swept aside moral restraints and as the dissenting poor turned to badness-honour as a response to their marginal status." Just listen to today's music, and watch today's behaviour!

The "view that outlawry and crime in the slums were understandable, if unfortunate responses, to deprivation," Gray wrote, was "the dominant opinion among left-wing activists, liberal groups calling for reform, and top figures in the major parties."

To this day a surviving top figure from the political battles of the past keeps articulating the view that poverty breeds crime in some kind of direct correlation. Gray concludes, as I do, that, "ultimately, these shifts in social and cultural norms within and beyond the ghetto gave moral cover to the criminal underground and its predation." And further, infected the whole country with an attitude of badness and rebellion against order.

It is going to be far easier to drive down the murder rate and even to achieve some short-term economic growth than it is going to be to fix the social and moral decay plaguing this society. And by 'moral', I don't mean goody-goody or even religious. I mean adherence to the universal rules of civilised conduct which make an ordered and orderly society possible without coercive brute force.

Effective policing, with more boots on the ground, targeting the gangs, and interventions to address some of the proximate conditions which breed and sustain the gangs as community agents, can dramatically drive down violent crime.

While the political parties were aiding and abetting gangs towards their own ends, Government has never resourced the police to do an effective crime-fighting job. Indeed, one of the greatest acts of treachery against the Jamaican State has been the political assistance given to crime while the governments formed by the political parties have starved the crime-fighting and justice agencies of even the most basic resources to succeed.

The prospects of transformational change do not look too bright despite the declarations made. My friend and former column colleague, Kevin O'Brien Chang, is stridently insisting that senatorial 'independence' is theoretical fiction - no matter what the 'founding fathers' intended - that has no basis in practical reality.

The action of the leader of the Opposition (not the leader of the JLP, by the way, a position which has no constitutional standing) to oust senators he had recommended to the governor general for appointment seems more supportive of the old political order, with the supremacy of the party over everything else, which has so hampered our country and the quest for transformational politics.

The Supreme Court, the underutilised Constitutional Court, in its ruling tomorrow, will, I am sure, be pre-eminently guided by constitutional intent rooted in the long and deep traditions of Westminster parliamentary democracy rather than by the corruption of the system by the political parties in and out of Government or the stupidity or vindictiveness, howsoever those may be, of the parties appearing. We await.

Martin Henry is a university administrator, communication specialist and public affairs commentator. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.