EDITORIAL: The PNP, too, must clean house

Mrs Portia Simpson Miller, president of the People's National Party (PNP), was right when a week ago she advised her party against gloating over the discomfiture and probable collapse facing the Golding administration, having been caught in lies and deception over its involvement in, and management of, the Christopher Coke extradition affair.

We do not sense that Mrs Simpson Miller's admonition was founded in the fundamental reason why this newspaper - along with the majority of Jamaicans - believes that the PNP, except for narrow political considerations, has little to gloat about. There was a whiff of sentimentality in her remark, including her call for Jamaicans to be charitable to Prime Minister Bruce Golding and his family and to engage in prayer for the country as a whole.

For while the immediate political crisis that Jamaica now faces may have been authored by the ruling Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the Golding government, the foundation on which it stands is not theirs alone. The PNP, too, is culpable.

criminality and politics

Mr Coke's power base in Tivoli Gardens, in Mr Golding's West Kingston parliamentary constituency, may have been the original, and the most highly organised of Jamaica's garrison communities/constituencies. And the Coke affair may have exposed the raw side of the nexus between criminality and politics.

Yet, it is also a fact that both of Jamaica's major political parties have fostered these zones of political exclusion and, nurtured the strong-armed enforcers, over whom they have lost control. Fixing that problem as Prime Minister Golding promised again to do in his recent speech of atonement is a matter of urgency if Jamaica is to emerge from the social and political dysfunction that contribute significantly to the country's murder count of over 1,600 a year.

Indeed, Peter Bunting, the PNP's general secretary, implicitly acknowledged his party's past complicity in this nasty underbelly of the country's politics in a parliamentary speech this month in which he pledged the PNP's disassociation from "any alliance, dependency or common cause with organised crime and gang culture".

spoken words

"This is the cause for which we are prepared to expend political capital," he said.

We endorse that position. Unfortunately, the PNP has so far, spoken words.

At the National Executive Council where Mrs Simpson Miller spoke, there was a perfunctory endorsement of the Bunting declaration, but there was no rigorous analysis of what, in practical terms, it means, or how it is to be enforced.

So, while the PNP has established an Integrity Commission by which Mr Bunting said the party would "hold ourselves to higher standards than provided by the established laws of the state", there is not a sense of deep engagement of the issue by Mrs Simpson Miller and her leaders.

The point is thatthe PNP needs to convince Jamaicans that it is engaged in more than publications, merely intending to take advantage of the problems facing the JLP and the administration. Jamaica demands and deserves better.

It would serve the PNP to note that while there is public disappointment and anger with Mr Golding, the JLP and its government, this has not translated into mass support for the opposition party. Jamaicans believe that there is much muck to be cleared from the PNP.

Mrs Simpson Miller should start her house cleaning before an inspection is called.

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