Intergenerational political corruption
IT WOULD be great — if it were true — that the old corrupt politics is dying in Jamaica, as old politicians are replaced by younger ones. The trouble is that the young ones learn their politics from their elders, and so the more things change, the more they remain the same, as the Good Book says.
We must not fool ourselves into thinking that just because someone is young — say, born after Independence — they are going to be new and different. There are durable social processes that transmit norms and values from one political generation to the next, and the older heads will not select young bucks to replace them who are not cut from the same cloth.
Young people with new ideas and higher ideals and values will quickly be spit out of the mouth of the party apparatus as they expose the sleaze of the old guard, and as they fail to meet the expectations of the lumpen followership.
And so intergenerational political corruption is the default option. For young politicians — or veteran politicians for that matter — to move Jamaica away from patronage politics, which is all about the distribution of scarce benefits and spoils to the party faithful, requires a change of heart, a conversion of sorts, akin to that experienced by Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus.
DECLINING VOTER TURNOUT
The ever-declining voter turnout at each new general election exposes the growing disillusionment of the electorate with the way Jamaica is being governed — by both parties — as the ‘die-hearted’ die off or migrate.
Each new generation of Jamaicans is more literate, more educated, and more discerning, expecting to ‘step up inna life’ by virtue of their ability and skill, and not by their ‘connections’. This makes them less tolerant of ‘blys’ and ‘fren-business’, which is the way of the old politics.
Judging by the responses of some of our young voters, there were great expectations of the young new leader of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Quoting from the JLP Manifesto (page 16) for the 2016 general election, he promised to do away with the old politics:
“We are committed to the establishment of internationally acceptable standards of good governance.
We simply must bring an end to the incidence of institutionalized injustice, abuse of power and rampant corruption”. There would be “mandatory disclosure of Integrity Reports by the Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition, and Minister of Finance”.
None of this has happened, or appears to be on the horizon.
And then just before the 2016 local government elections, the JLP put in place, under questionable circumstances, a $600-million de-bushing programme, which sounded very much like the worst of the old politics ‘come back again’. The announcement of a major rebuild of the Junction Road just before the 2017 by-election in South East St. Mary, of which we have seen no sign, sounded like ‘same-old, same-old’.
Designed to influence ‘likkylikky’ voters from the ‘old politics’, these actions, which are clearly abuses of power and breaches of internationally accepted standards of good governance, may have further turned off many more of Jamaica’s already-disillusioned electorate. If the JLP had resisted the temptation to continue the old ways, it may have won by an even wider margin.
The recent tribal statements by Ruddy Spencer (promising JLP supporters more scarce benefits and spoils), and the light rap on the knuckles which he received, is further evidence that there may be, in fact, no real break with the past.
I would encourage our young prime minister - who has already shown by his environmentally friendly actions that he has the potential to be new and different— to try harder to set his administration on a new course. He will not be forgiven his egregious slip-ups if he does not show clearly that he is prepared to tackle political corruption “in an uncompromising manner” (Manifesto page 15).