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Ian Boyne, ColumnistPortia Simpson Miller has received a battering for allegedly copping out of the opportunity to be questioned by private sector leaders, fearing, her detractors say, that she might not be able to competently deal with the issues put to her.
While some sections of the media are not shy about questioning the People's National Party (PNP) leadership aspirant's ability to deal with the critical issues, they are not as alert to the fact that politicians in the two main political parties have themselves been skirting some critical issues, often behind a veil of eloquence and intellectual sophistry. Commentators are not as alert to spotting shallowness when it comes in respectable middle class rhetoric, flavoured with academic degrees. The entire political class in Jamaica has been evading some pivotal issues and avoiding certain crucial questions.
With the level of worker demotivation and alienation in Jamaica, deeply rooted in our plantation history, and with most workers feeling no sense of loyalty to management, how can Jamaican workers produce world-class goods and services to compete in the global marketplace? Do our workers have a passion for excellence, an indomitable commitment to doing the very best even in the face of an uncaring, selfish management? Or are they just doing the best not to be fired and to hold on to their jobs?
BUILDING a FIRST-CLASS SOCIETY
Omar Davies talks about building a first-class, First World society in his 'Campaign for Prosperity' a most laudable vision. But what will it take to achieve it? He understands rightly that we have to significantly reform the educational system and widen both access and quality. But, as Finance Minister, does he not realise the real and stubborn constraints to finding the financing to do that? If we are going to balance the budget we can't make the kinds of investments needed to really radically overhaul the education system at the same time.
And Omar Davies, a genuinely sharp intellectual and rigorous thinker, knows that there is not much aid floating around to fund significant education transformation in Jamaica. Besides, while poverty rates are going down, commendably, many of the students who have access to education can't maximise that access because of poverty and malnourishment. If the parents can't afford bus fares and lunch money and don't place the kind of emphasis on education that they should, then with all the access in the world and improved quality, a critical proportion of our population will still not be educated.
People's values would have to change to the extent where lunch money or no lunch money, bus fares or no bus fares, the children are going to school. And with the proper values and socialisation from the home on the importance of education, poor children would go the extra mile to learn, despite the poverty and hunger. That happened in former generations. But if they are more interested in play, fun and hanging out with friends on days off from school, the lack of lunch money and bus fares will be a handy excuse not to go to school. The politicians in Jamaica don't realise the existent to which the issue of values impinges on everything, including the achievement of their goals. They talk glibly and sometimes with apparent profundity about all kinds of lofty goals which are absolutely unattainable in our context of inimical values and attitudes.
COMMITMENT TO
BUILDING JAMAICA
Professor Carl Stone, one of the finest intellectuals this country has ever produced, said it clearly 13 years ago in his paper 'Values, Norms and Personality development in Jamaica': "Human behaviour is significantly shaped by norms and values. Values define for society the things people strive for and attach great meaning and significance to".
It is one thing to focus on the politicians' visions and strategies for transforming Jamaica but if we don't focus on the state of the followership and its vision, or lack of it, then we would be dangerously misguided.
What has been the effect of migration, the cultural penetration from North American media, and the BETisation of Jamaica? How have these affected the values of Jamaican youth and their aspirations? One thing is clear: Our youth are far more impatient with the pace of success than previous generations. A graduate of the university wants a car right away as well as a job which can facilitate his moving out of his parents' home into an apartment. If he does not get that he is frustrated, thinks he is being exploited and that he had better go abroad to fulfil his dream of the 'good life'. It is small wonder that our migration rate is so high among tertiary-educated graduates. And most working class persons if given the opportunity would also leave Jamaica.
CORRUPTION
There is no sense of commitment to building Jamaica or in making life here. There is no feeling that there is something worth sacrificing for in Jamaican, No 'Big Hairy Audacious Goals' as the management experts would put it. No 'Campaign for Prosperity' can be built on this kind of foundation. A foundation like this, it is obvious, is not solid as a rock! And
certainly HOPE cannot be built on such a shaky foundation. Nor will constitutional reforms, political reforms or an infusion of foreign direct investments and aggregate economic growth deal sustainably with our fundamental challenges of underdevelopment unless we fix the cultural and moral foundation.
Corruption is rampant in the country, not only in the state but in the private sector. Business people are involved in bringing in goods and evading taxes and duties. Business people pay off customs officers so that they can trade unfairly in the marketplace. They pay criminal dons extortion which fund arms purchases.
A major part of the reason we can't get a full handle on crime is due to the corruption in the police force. If you don't have police officers who would prefer to continue living in Waltham Park, Greenwich Town or Tower Hill rather than taking millions of dollars in blood money to afford townhouses in Kingston 6 and Kingston 8, then how can crime be contained? If people don't put morality over money, then no
matter how many good laws are enacted, criminals are will con-tinue to escape the justice system.
Increasingly, the values of our people are defined by materialistic obsessions, hedonism, status, and 'blinging'. Portia Simpson Miller can talk community development all she wants, youth and youth are thinking of their own hustling and getting ahead, rather than attending community meetings, giving voluntary service, etc. The kind of social activism which gripped many youth in the 1970s is gone. The interest in political and public affairs which characterised youth and young adults of the 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s is gone. The youth today are wrapped up in their own little worlds or their big world of career, business, making money, maximising pleasure, 'blinging', building a status-driven life. Do you think the youth are fired up by any of the campaigns in the PNP? Are they really excited about Bruce Golding?
Large numbers of Jamaicans are tuned-out from all the parties. Oh, sure, some will vote in elections but their hearts and souls are not in politics; not in the way that DK Duncan's, Arnold Bertram's and Eddie Seaga's generation was. Talking economics and political reform is not enough to win back the hearts and minds of the Jamaican youth and the Jamaican people.
UNEMPLOYMENT CRISIS?
And even in the area of economics and politics, our political leaders are woefully inadequate in their presentations.
Nobody is seriously addressing the fact that the world and Jamaica faces a serious crisis of creating decent employment. Employment has not kept up with economic growth. The knowledge and capital-intensive mode of capitalist globalisation is rendering more and more people unemployable. A lot of the menial, low-skill tasks which untrained people used to do have been eliminated.
What will we do with the large numbers of persons who are untrained, unskilled and with high expectations of earnings? How will we contain their frustrations without some national vision bigger than themselves; something beyond the materialistic goodies which all the politicians are promising in one form or another?
Langston Hughes puts it well: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore - and then run? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?" It's a question our politicians should ask.
Even if we have the economic growth and increased investments, which all the politicians are promising the people, none of them has the guts to tell the people that for many of them that will not mean anything, for the jobs created will be few and only for the trained and educated. So we will continue to have the proliferation of massage parlours, exotic clubs for the girls and the security guard work for the men those who don't want to take to the gun and criminality. Economic growth doesn't automatically trickle-down to the poor, the politicians should tell the people. But why am I being naïve?
Only a people with a strong moral and cultural foundation can sustain the hardships of unemployment, poverty and economic and social deprivation without
'bowing' to anti-social behaviour.
Protected trade is going fast. Concessionary aid won't increase appreciably. Middle-income countries like Jamaica are facing increased competition from poorer countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The World Trade Organisation has a stranglehold around our necks, the international capital markets are stringent and demanding and China and India have far more impact on Jamaica than we realise. Our politicians talk about globalisation but they are not prepared to tell us the whole truth about its negative impacts on our standards of living and prospects for fulfilment. Because if they do we will realise that they are not omnipotent, after all. They have a stake in our ignorance.
But it is the media's job to ask the right questions, to penetrate the articulate rhetoric and studied eloquence.
Ian Boyne is a veteran
journalist. You can send your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com.
