Martin Henry

'Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.' [Psalms 90:12, NIV].

On Monday we were 45. August has been traditionally reserved for Emancipation, Independence, hurricanes and the highest monthly murder rate for the year. Madam Prime Minister, from careful numbering, has this year chosen to add sizzle to the summer siesta by making August 7 Nomination Day for the general election and August 27 the day for the prophesied victory at the polls.

Independence celebrations, in a nation feeling old and tired at 45, have lost their lustre. The restored Emancipation Day, only 10 years now, has also lost its lustre. There is no way that a full-blown election campaign would not do further damage to these already weakened national memorial days. But then some things are more important than others. And knowing which is which is the essence of wisdom.

What have we done with 45 years?

Jamaica is a spectacularly different place today than it was in 1962. Many of the changes have simply come with the swell of global change.

Blind to achievements

The principle of rising expectations, where more is never enough, tends to blind our eyes to positive changes and significant achievements. Jamaica has led much of the developing world in health and education revolutions. Building on a pre-Independence public health revolution, within a year of Independence malaria had been eradicated. Its recent resurgence, ironically epicentred in the run-down constituencies of the party leaders, is an index of how we have made many gains slip.

Life expectancy, one of the fundamental measures of the health of a nation, has shot up by more than a decade to First World levels in a developing nation that has had major economic challenges for most of its 45 years.

We hardly notice - or celebrate - the primary school in every nook and cranny of Jamaica which places every Jamaican child within walking distance of a school. But we have to wonder why literacy rates can't match Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago.

Norman Manley introduced the Common Entrance Examination with a mere 2,000 students in 1958. And the Independence period has brought massive access to secondary education, and, more recently, to tertiary education. But we have to ask, why don't we do better in the CXC examinations?

We have gone from a sugar and bananas economy to a much more diversified one, strongly supported by the new industries of bauxite and tourism. But the permitted decline of agriculture has to be one of our great failures. Bauxite will run out and we have failed to use revenue from this non-renewable resource specifically to buil economic opportunities as little desert Dubai did from oil revenue.

15-fold increase in murder

In 1960 there were exactly 60 murders in Jamaica! In recent years, without election violence, we have been running close to 1,600. A 15-fold increase per 100,000 of population. There have been reports of politically linked murders this election season, and some Nomination Day violence and indiscipline.

Linked to the 'bruk-out' of criminal violence driven by politics has been the destruction of swathes of the capital city and the conversion of prime residential and commercial space into inner-city ghettos. Ghettos in the true sense of the word, places where people are trapped and isolated and impoverished, and, in our case, live under don rule. Our party leaders are very familiar with this blighted landscape and its origins.

No other place on the planet, size for size, number for number, has thrown up the creative talent which Jamaica has in the last 45 years in a variety of fields. But at the same time we are world leaders in coarseness and indiscipline, some of it driven by the same creativity in the popular culture, some of it by our decadent politics.

Culture products have been demonstrated to be our best value-added products as we make do with low-end tourism, the low end of the aluminium industry and low-end agro-industry, with surviving sugar and bananas losing preferential access to the EU market.

In Independence week, with election manifestos and debates running, we need to pause and find in sober and honest reflection a heart of wisdom to guide us into the future.