Ronald Thwaites | What can go so?

When since is the United States government so solicitous about the welfare of Cuban workers even though they have persecuted that nation for over 60 years?

And when since are the great Americans so concerned about our spiraling debt to the Chinese for work done for our benefit when no other source of international capital was available? So who do they approve of us dealing with then?

Why not a whimper of disgust and protest when, directly aiming at us in the Caribbean, everyone who buys oil from Venezuela is to be punished by those who have never given our gas-guzzling culture and crippling electricity sector one dollar of concession like PetroCaribe did? Which country has given the greatest boost to reducing our debt to GDP ratio?

EVIL BACKDROP

Seriously, why do you think the US is interested in Ukraine, Guyana, Suriname and regime change in Venezuela if not for control of their mineral and fossil-fuel wealth, destined to be extracted, just like our bauxite, for penny-quattie?

Then what “skin-teet” and “suck-up” are we, the heirs of Busta and Manley, expected to show our principled support for dismantling South African apartheid-era land injustice is now to be baptised as “white genocide” by the proto-president?

What can go so? We used to never compromise with our principled foreign policy. I am grateful that we had a leader who taught us that “we must go forward on our feet and not on our knees”?

LOCAL FOOLISHNESS

But, in our own Parliament last week, wasn’t there a similar effort to revise Jamaica’s last half-century of economic history in a pathetic, frantic effort to delude us by claiming victory when loss and defeat stalks the land?

Do they have not the slightest pang of conscience to bank the desk at the “dash-weh” of a one-grand added on the minimum wage when they same ones have given themselves 300-per cent-salary increase with our money for doing no more work?

How about when our funds are offered at lower cost by the Bank of Jamaica to financial institutions who then figuratively long out their collective tongues at us when we ask them for a little less usury?

MISGUIDED

How do you reconcile the proposal to reduce tax on raw food imports without choking on Floyd Green and Delano Seiveright’s own words about promoting local agriculture and fostering linkages with the tourist industry? What is being done about food inflation which is debilitating most of us?

What mathematics undergirds denying taxi operators their negotiated fare increase while using their tax dollars and ours, to have the “bigly” unprofitable JUTC compete against them on all routes without a comprehensive national transport policy in sight.

Please say how we should react when the Jamaica Youth Advocacy Network reports the School Nutrition Policy being further delayed even as we say eradicating hungry-belly illiteracy in schools is the key to national development.

TOO LIE

So if you never intended to immediately bring into effect the law purporting to make Portmore a parish, why didn’t you say so, defuse the controversy and forego the indecent haste to pass it? Remember ‘Warmy’, a man not known for keeping his own counsel, had blurted out the party’s true reasons from months ago.

People in power must stop taking us for fools. None of these issues are as they are presented to be. Nothing no go so.

ADDING VALUE

Thankfully, last week too there were redemptive moments. In our school, one of the many scarred and wounded youngsters, having been exposed to some intense one-on-one teacher interaction, correction and encouragement, has moved from grade-two reading to grade four and will achieve grade six competency by June. That’s what it will take to mend tens of thousands like him.

And, although he still hardly talks, his classmates speak of him as kind and helpful when they are doing projects. He is becoming less-angry and more self-confident. Here’s one less potential criminal- in- the-making now transforming into a decent youth. Praise God!

QUALITY LEADERSHIP

Then last Tuesday Professor Canute Thompson launched his latest book, Reimaginative Leadership. In it he provides a model for and examples of leaders in all spheres, but especially education, who are secure in themselves and incarnate a philosophy steeped in an ethic of service which promotes equality and justice.

His arc of reimaginative leadership spans from the religious reformers John Wycliffe and Jan Hus through to the courage and humility of Mandela; the ethics of relationship and accountability of a company like JMMB, to the dogged devotion to the common good of Mia Mottley and Peter Phillips.

What a contrast to some of the self-indulgent bombast spewed in Gordon House especially by those members who are petrified at the prospect of losing power.

Leaders are cultivated and created by willful choices as much as by circumstances. Are we teaching and modelling servant leadership in this nation now?

GOOD EXAMPLE

That question reminds me of the excellence of a presentation by Jason Sharp of Coffee Traders to a large audience of senior secondary students last Tuesday at St. George’s College. With no frills or pretensions, this gentleman told his story of effort, opportunity, failure and success doing business in Jamaica. The powerful unspoken message was that similar attitudes could yield positive results for those young people too. Dangerously, they don’t often hear such quality of discourse.

Suffused as students are by a suffocating exam culture and, for many, a deep underlying doubt about their own worth; too easily drunk on the beguiling Babylon of idle life and social media, there is little encouragement about the value and happiness of cleaving to Jamaica.

Sharp held his audience by his simple genuineness. They engaged him with searching questions. The content of the occasion was that of a university business school case study. And it was for free.

At the Thompson book launch Jamaican Canadian academic Professor Ann Lopez, aligned herself with the author in stressing the imperative of people like us grounding ourselves in the truth of our past then so strengthened, grasping the opportunities and challenges of our present. No self-pity, no excuses.

This thinking reinforces my point that we have the capacity to do much better for ourselves if we were less beguiled with the false narratives, some mentioned above, foisted on us often, sadly, by those who we entrust to lead us out of mental slavery.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com