In my last contribution to this publication, I highlighted some of the real positives worth celebrating in Jamaica after 63 years of self-government. The celebrations are now over and it’s time to focus on the future. We have a lot of work and catching up to do, if we are serious about making this little rock a viable place to live. I will now highlight some of the negatives we need to rethink as priorities over the next decade as a nation, institutions and approaches that have not served us well and need to be rethought and even abandoned.
- How we educate and prepare our people for good citizenship?. Massive overhaul of the system of education should be our #1 priority. From my days as a young student, I recall numerous respected voices calling for the schools to ensure the teaching of our real history. The effects of not doing so are evident in the general ignorance of too many of our adult population being so ignorant and even susceptible to much of the misinformation and ignorance among too many within our populations in the region.
- How we approach the general health care of our people?. This must start in the schools at the lowest levels. Health education must be a priority. Kids must be taught about their bodies, how it works. what to feed it in order to ensure maximum healthy outcomes. Another critical role for Government is ensuring that our regulatory agencies are seriously monitoring imported fast-food enterprises, ensuring healthy inputs into their food processing for public consumption. It is not by chance that many European countries refuse to allow several American franchises from operation in their countries. The result is their citizens end up healthier for it! That level of scrutiny seems to be absent in Jamaica.
- Public transportation is too critical to development for it to be approached in this ramshackle and unprofessional manner. It is at the core of our nation’s productivity and development and must be treated with more care, planning and purpose. As with too much in Jamaica, partisan politics has no productive place in this area. In many ways it has become a nightmare for citizens whose only desire is to move from point A to point B safely, comfortably and on time.
- The Senate has become a non-functional arm of the ruling party, rather than the independent check and balance it was designed to be. scrap it.
- Local government is proving to be a waste of limited resources. It may be a good idea to simply consider absorbing all its “functions” into central government, under any new republic-styled dispensation.
- Political parties have become cults in this largely ignorant society. The parties have each, over time, successfully manipulated the small minds of the electorate to their advantage. The concept of a “die-hard” means that rational thinking is thrown out the door in the interest of a party. Often a party cares little about the well-being of its average voter. At the core of this problem is ignorance. Focusing on serious education as at #1 above, may well address this over time.
- Crime and violence are at an all-time high. No serious development can take place under such conditions. Justice comes too slowly in Jamaica and often not at all. This leads people to take matters in their own hands. It cannot continue like this. We all know what to do, we just seem not to have the will to do it. We must start at the top. There is too much corruption in the leadership of our country. Both the public and private sectors are complicit here. The Jamaica Constabulary Force must be shuttered and restarted from the bottom up with the finest of the finest of our citizens who really believe in the mission to serve and protect, not just the rich and famous (as it was originally established to do), but every Jamaican. All the agencies allied in the dispensing of justice must be augmented with the resources they need and allowed freedom to pursue that justice. No man or woman must be above the law. It’s the only way to ensure order and equity in the society.
- People showing an interest in public life must be subjected to significant public scrutiny prior to and during public engagement. Too many criminally minded individuals enter the fray only to defraud the hard working and long-suffering taxpayers in this country for too long. Few, if any, have paid the ultimate price, and it’s no wonder public life seems so attractive to criminal minds.
If we can tackle these critical areas together as a country over the next decade, I believe we would be worthy of celebrating our 70th year with enormous pride as a truly independent and emancipated nation.
Finally, as I’ve always maintained, the weakest link in our democracy is the followership. It’s not enough just to vote (and fewer and fewer of us are doing that), we must get involved. It is the voters who must drive the bus by insisting that the elected leaders do what they promised to do. Just handing the country over to the two political parties to do as they wish every few years has not served us too well in the past. As the picture in this article so beautifully shows: If the people will only stand up, the party will be over. Jamaica belongs to us all. Not just the privileged few.
