Is ZOSO more than political optics?
Members of the security forces talk with a resident in Denham Town, west Kingston, during ZOSO operations, recently.
IN THE year 2000 when the nation experienced another of its spikes in the murder rate and some influential members of the big business community made sufficient noise, the politicians reached for the Crime Management Unit (CMU) and made SSP Reneto Adams into the most feared crime fighter at high noon and at midnight.
By 2005, Jamaica had made it to the top of the international list in murder rates. In late 2017, the flavour of the moment is Zones of Special Operations (ZOSOs). It is being seen by those most charitable in their views of this JLP administration as the Government’s best response to the country’s runaway murder rate.
But cracks have begun to show up, and it would be foolish to pretend they do not exist just because we want to come out on the right side of ‘inaction is not an option’. The very fact the that ZOSO has been extended by 60 days in Mount Salem, the first community chosen for this great social experiment, is likely to mean that the $2.6 billion price tag for ZOSO has begun its budget-busting movement.
FULL CAPACITY
The Government and the security forces do not have the resources of personnel and cash to operate more than three ZOSOs at any one time. Bear in mind that there is a ZOSO in Denham Town, so the nation is near to full capacity on its ineffectiveness.
To the extent that a ZOSO in a community lessens murders and gives the residents a boost in how much safer, secure, and happier they feel, a ZOSO is a microcosm of effective governance, but in a concentrated form, that only a withdrawal of state resources from other areas can make possible.
It is, therefore, unsustainable. “ZOSO is like a pardner,” said a local university professor to me recently. “Everybody cannot get a draw all at once, so Mount Salem get the first draw then Denham Town. The big spoiler is that having been given the first draw, with many other troubled and needy communities lining up for their draw, Mount Salem is set to get the third draw, too.”
A Jamaican journalist living abroad for a decade, but fully in touch with matters close to home, asked me last Wednesday: “Why are you ruling out the likelihood that there is more strategic politics in the matter instead of it matching with the bigger plan? Maybe it was done to burnish the lukewarm political image of the West Central St James JLP MP, Marlene Malahoo Forte.”
“I never saw it that way, but if it is so, I congratulate her on her acute understanding of effective political horse trading,” I said.
Nuff a dem a dutty murderer, and if it do come to court, no witness, and dem get wey. Me suspect a who a kill dem, an me support the move.