Munroe INDEPENDENT SENATOR Professor Trevor Munroe, has called on the Government to bring together the opposition parties and leaders of civil society to work out a joint plan on how to deal with the external threat posed by cocaine trafficking through the island, as well as the internal decay caused by the corruption of officials.
He has also called on the Government to level with the people, "to bring us into its confidence on the extent of the cocaine threat from outside and the extent of the corruption within".
According to Professor Munroe, "there is now definite evidence to suggest that the incidence of speed boat and 'go-fast' activity trafficking cocaine, mainly from Colombia, into and through Jamaica has more than doubled compared to 1999."
He said "there is a clear and present danger that the tens of millions of US dollars involved in this trafficking is buying and corrupting not only elements in the police force, but individual politicians, customs and correctional officers" and "ultimately judges and prosecutors are in danger as well".
Professor Munroe was speaking at the 50th anniversary dinner of the Department of Co-operative and Friendly Societies at the Hilton Kingston Hotel on Friday night.
In an address in which he called on Jamaicans to come together to meet the Colombian threat, Professor Munroe said the continuation of the tug-o-war between the government and the opposition parties, one section of the police leadership and the other, between government and civil society, was not helping "us the peace-loving and well-thinking citizens".
Making crime control a political football, he said, was helping the cocaine traffickers, the merchants of turf wars, violence and murder to divide and ultimately rule the Jamaican people.
Professor Munroe said the officials having been corrupted, "we Jamaicans shall have even less control over our leaders and over our own lives than we now have; turf wars among cocaine gangs become even more violent, and drug-related murder and mayhem even more prevalent."
Against that background, the Independent Senator said Jamaicans and particularly the island's leaders, now face clear choices. "Continue the tribalism with the three parties fighting to upstage one another and we shall surely end up with not only a 'failed government', but a 'failed state' and a 'failed society' as well."
In such a scenario, he said, "our democracy, our rights shall be overtaken by feuding war lords as in Sierra Leone or Liberia, or authoritarian rule as has happened in countries like Pakistan or Nigeria or Haiti.
The second choice, he said, was becoming more clear and urgent to call a halt to the tribal war, corruption and anarchy. "This is the road of Jamaicans calling 'time out' amongst ourselves and coming together, if only temporarily, to deal with this growing emergency against the cocaine invasion from outside and the corruption in our midst, already in high places."
Calling 'time out' and coming together as a nation is not going to be easy, but is urgent, said Professor Munroe. He said it required a critical mass of citizens recognising that the road of war is a road to self-destruction and therefore, whatever the difficulty, "we have got to turn away from tearing one another to pieces and turn to coming together in the interest of survival."
Professor Munroe said that "even as we recognise this, we have to pressure the government to play a critical role in the coming together". It was on those bases that Professor Munroe called for government to bring the opposition parties and leaders of civil society together to arrive at consensus on how to deal with the external threat and the internal decay.
"The government must take the lead in taking the issue of the cocaine threat, and crime control out of the political arena," said Professor Munroe, a lecturer in the Department of Government on the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI). "Either we come together and survive or deepen the divisions and die as a viable democracy."
