By Don Robotham, Contributor 
Central Kingston residents view the body of Neville Johnson at the death scene after the triple murder at James Street in area on Wednesday. - Rudolph Brown/Chief Photographer
ONE OF the most intriguing features of the local crime scene is the
tendency for hardened criminals to be discovered hiding in deep rural communities. Whether it be in the bucolic hills of St. Ann or the misty valleys of St. James, it is clear that urban criminals in Jamaica have deep rural roots.
What is this connection between urban crime and the deceptively wholesome, far flung Jamaican village whose virtues are often sung in one pious speech after the other?
The connection can be found in one word: poverty. Despite the attention which urban poverty gets from the press and the politicians, the fact is that the really serious poverty in Jamaica lies hidden in the countryside.
It is in the countryside, not the inner city, that most of those who fall below the poverty line live. It is also in the countryside that the poverty is deepest.
SOUL-DESTROYING POVERTY
As both Dr. Jaslin Salmon and Dr. Ashu Handa have pointed out recently, urban poverty among young people is also on the increase. And generally, youth unemployment remains stuck at over 40 per cent.
But the really grinding
poverty is particularly to be found among the small farming community.
Hurtling along on our new highways, this poverty may be rendered invisible. God forbid that this should be the intent!
For we have paid in the past, are paying now and will pay again in the future a heavy price in crime and lost lives for this rural blight. The current crisis in Spanish Town is one brutal expression of this reality.
This rural-urban migration has brought us many positives.
Our urban middle class, reggae and dancehall music, Rastafarianism, Revivalism as well as the surge in urban Pentecostalism, are incomprehensible if one fails to understand that they arise, in their different ways, out of country coming to town.
But there are also many
negatives. What happens is this: an oppressive, soul-destroying poverty drives many youth to flee the countryside.
In the towns, there is little formal sector employment to be found but there is even less in the country. So, the young rural-urban migrant starts to hustle.
As Dr. Tony Harriott has argued convincingly, this urban informal sector activity which has grown enormously over the years to become the single largest sector of the employed labour force, is itself a source of intense contentiousness, inter-personal rivalry and relies on local enforcers and jungle justice. It is no picnic, despite the hymns to micro-enterprise sung by our economic romantics.
UNEMPLOYMENT AND
UNDEREMPLOYMENT
Moreover, from this urban informal sector activity (can one call it employment?) it is but a short step to illegal activity, full blown.
In fact, the two, though not the same, are inextricably intertwined. The violent crimes take place in the towns where the uprooted have been deposited, but its social roots are rural.
Thus, we have embedded in our culture the figure of the decent but naïve rural-urban migrant who arrives in Kingston off a country bus but who is eventually turned into a 'dog-hearted' criminal immortalised by Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come.
There can be no doubt about the connection between high male youth unemployment and underemployment, especially in the towns, and crime.
Violent crime in Jamaica is mainly carried out by urban males between the ages of 15-29 who have incomplete
secondary education but have never, ever held a formal sector job, not once in their entire lives. Many of these young males are rural born or at most, one generation removed from village life.
The fact that most violent crimes are not committed in the countryside (this may be changing!) should not mislead us.
This story of rural poverty feeding urban crime in Jamaica (and elsewhere) is not new. Indeed, it is the source of the original foundation of our
current inner city communities.
As has frequently been pointed out and should never be
forgotten, almost without exception, our inner cities originated in the late 19th century, a gift to us from colonialism.
They were all a result of the collapse of our rural economy which followed the introduction by the British of the Sugar Duties Act of 1846. The new dispensation by the World Trade Organisation and the European Union on banana and sugar are the sugar duties acts of the 21st century. Unless we act with more urgency and intelligence, the social consequences will be even more dire.
One only has to look at the data on urbanisation in Jamaica over the past 20 years to see where we have been heading. When I was growing up, Jamaica was about 70 per cent rural. Today, the rural population is about 40 per cent or less. Not only have St. Catherine and Montego Bay grown rapidly, so have many parish townships such as Ocho Rios and Santa Cruz.
The stagnation and decline of the rural economy continues unabated and is feeding this steady flight to the towns all over Jamaica.
Not much imagination is needed to see where this leads socially and politically. If we have garrisons and mayhem in Kingston, Spanish Town and Montego Bay today, expect them in Ocho Rios tomorrow, if not today!
Therefore, as a matter of urgency, there needs to be much more focus on addressing rural poverty than is currently the case. Far more sustained effort needs to be made to improve the social and physical infrastructure of rural life.
After all, when we talk of values and attitudes in Jamaica, it
invariably is the Protestant ethic of peasant Jamaica that we have in mind.
RURAL DEVELOPMENT
PARTNERSHIP
It also has to be said, that the many rural MPs in Jamaica have not distinguished themselves as advocates of the countryside.
They seem more preoccupied with capturing a rural
constituency as a platform to advance their out-of-control national ambitions.
Indeed, a view seems to have jelled in some political quarters that the discontented rural youth vote is a chicken ready to be plucked by ruthless young
political opportunists from the city who will stop at nothing. Nothing at all!
But the opportunists are jumping into a vacuum which really exists. Perhaps the time has come to form a rural development partnership which would put rural issues on the front burner.
Important figures in both the public and private sectors who constantly remind us of their deep rural roots, this is your time to stand up and be counted!
