Indiscipline in governance
FLY HIGH or fly low, this administration is going to be remembered for, perhaps come to be defined by, having turned away 43 Jamaicans from their homeland with the planet in the throes of a pandemic pestilence. No given explanation, reason, report, or excuse will suffice. It is simply morally, humanely, archivally wrong!
It is unchristian-like behaviour, defying, as it does, all the cherished principles enshrined in the parable of the good Samaritan: the difference, as they say, between being seen as a human being and regarded as being human.
There is no escaping that the vast majority of Jamaicans, historically, do not have happy memories of their forebears being powerless aboard a ship on the Atlantic, not knowing where they might end up or when their feet might once again touch dry land.
Our hearts have been with those 43 crew members ever since their ship sailed away from Jamaican waters in early April 2020. Time and the belated publicly pressured promise extracted from the Government to have them repatriated will not erase the memory of that kind of betrayal: the stain of a deed most foul.
Every recent public poll report has tended strongly in favour of the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) retaining power in the upcoming general election. Of course, a day in politics, it is said, is a long, long time. As such, for the People’s National Party, there can be no slumping of the shoulders; its members are obliged, always, to put their best foot forward in the interest of our people. Sufficient, therefore, unto the day!
There is, however, a constancy of undisciplined, seemingly thoughtless behaviour at the highest levels in our country that, in the meantime – even with the unprecedented press of COVID-19, which itself is slowly showing up our unmistakable general societal indiscipline – cannot by any means remain ignored or placed in the background. And the JLP could hardly deny its continuing significant contribution to this horror that has too long settled on Jamaica’s social landscape.
Regardless of whether the message of the polls had pointed positively in their direction, it would have been incumbent on the JLP to ‘draw brakes’ and to seriously contemplate an about-turn from the several areas of destructive missteps coming from within its hierarchy.
Andrew Holness has been living with this undesirable experience since the final months of the year 2007, when his party assumed the reins of power once again after a long interval.
This jaw-dropping situation may be said to fall into three main categories: the costly instances of disdainfully showing a lack of respect for our laws and our Constitution, the far too many revelations of corrupt practices at the highest level of government, and the taking of in-your-face, unprincipled decisions that run against the grain of right thinking.
ISSUES
First, the JLP, both in Government and in Opposition, unrepentantly, has seemingly revelled in breaching and running afoul of the Constitution and laws of Jamaica regarding several issues:
1. Andrew Holness might be said to have received his baptism and initiation along that ill-advised route when, having just entered the Cabinet, he witnessed Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s angry faceoff with the Public Service Commission concerning the appointment of a solicitor general (2007-2008).
2. That could sparsely have sunken in when there came the JLP Government under Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s prolonged, extremely costly show of disrespect for the contours of Jamaica’s mutual-assistance regime concerning the US request for the delivery-up of Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke (2010-2011).
3. Perhaps now feeling emboldened along that errant path, and no doubt with some experienced guidance, Andrew Holness, as a young opposition leader, moved to extract pre-signed undated letters of resignation from would-be members of the Senate against them voting for Jamaica’s severance from the UK-based Privy Council – a court that has been absolutely out of the reach of the vast majority of our citizens for almost 200 years – and for all our people at last to share in the privilege of doorstep access to all their courts, including a new final appeal court, the Caribbean Court of Justice (2012).
4. With no lessons learnt, or appearing not to care, the present JLP Government, under Andrew Holness, brushed aside the insistent complaints of opposition voices concerning issues relating to proposed provisions of the National Identification System (NIDS) legislation (2018-2019).
5. This Andrew Holness Government, agonisingly, almost soiled Jamaica’s judicial edifice at its highest point by putting in place an insecure personage entirely unknown to the law and the Constitution – a provisional chief justice (2019).
6. And because of that woeful record sheet, one finds it almost impossible to come down on their side in the still unresolved controversy that surrounds this JLP Government under Andrew Holness’ promulgation of emergency regulations in addressing the COVID-19 challenge without reference to certain constitutional requirements contained in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms (2020).
And, as if those serious missteps were not enough, second, coupled with those blatant foundational breaches, are the now far-too-many findings and revelations of corrupt activity laid at the door of wide-ranging entities and personalities in the upper reaches of this JLP administration.
No government since the advent of adult suffrage here in our country has been so fiercely challenged by unacceptable, unscrupulous practices.
Space herein does not allow for an enumeration of these practices, starting from the very early days of the $900-million ‘bushing’ undertaking at the level of Cabinet ministers in 2016. Notwithstanding this lack of space, the breadth of these unforgettable complaints springs easily to mind and is impossible to move away as they rest bracingly, heavily, on our collective thinking.
And then, third, there are far too many searing instances of unprincipled action that visibly scar the landscape of our system of governance. The latest example, of course, even as the Government seeks to meet the COVID-19 challenges, has been the awful experience being suffered by those 43 Jamaican crew members.
STUMBLING BLOCKS
These kinds of blunders constitute hazardous stumbling blocks in the way of any concerted move for the re-creation of a disciplined society, a return to the embrace of wholesome values. Among them:
I. In contrast to how the urgent pleas of those crew members were distastefully ignored, Opposition Leader Holness, accompanied by spokesman Edmund Bartlett, openly spread the red carpet at the Norman Manley International Airport for a deportee convicted and having served his sentence in a friendly foreign country for the sexual abuse of a minor and thereafter attended a press briefing on behalf of that convicted deportee (2015).
Wonder what message those leaders thought such ill-considered activity would send, particularly to would-be rapists in our midst? On what principled ground do these leaders think they stand when they seek to rebuke an unruly constituent?
2. Not long before this JLP Government, under Andrew Holness, came to office, the constitutional court in our neighbouring Caribbean country of the Dominican Republic declared thousands of black persons of Haitian descent, long living within their borders, to be stateless citizens. This was roundly condemned by every regional and global organisation as being repugnant to all international conventions and norms touching upon citizens’ rights.
The president of the Dominican Republic soon rebuffed representations by the United Nations to have that incomprehensibly unjust decision of the constitutional court reversed. And yet, incongruously, this Government of ours moved swiftly to invite that same president of the Dominican Republic here to Jamaica to bestow on him the highest honour, no less, that Jamaica can bestow upon a non-citizen (2016). This JLP Government, under Andrew Holness’ unreceding brazenness, named the new North-South corridor for Edward Seaga, who had publicly railed against the very idea of the construction of the highway (2018).
Prime Minister Holness and the leadership of the JLP must recognise that non-adherence to the rule of law, their public facade being deeply mired in corrupt activity, and the appearance of the abandonment of sound moral principles all combine to portend the continued downside of acceptable behaviour in this, our Jamaican society.
Attention to the challenges of COVID-19 cannot reverse or push aside an acknowledgment of the unacceptable, and we are obliged to demand that they rise to a much higher level – a totally different, inspirational standard!
Regardless of how rosy the polls might appear to be at any point in time, experience teaches that there will always be a cost, a payback, to that kind of undisciplined settled course of action at the highest level. It’s simply a matter of time – karma!
Andrew Holness has to come squarely to the understanding that stripped of everything else, even with his popularity amply demonstrated by the poll findings, it is going to be extremely taxing and unrewarding to demand a respectable attitude and disciplined action from the populace, including from his own party supporters, in the face of his leadership being severely hamstrung by these disastrous negatives, to which he has been inescapably wedded during his years as part of the highest level of leadership of the Jamaica Labour Party.
The spectre of our people powerless aboard a ship crossing the Atlantic is not the sort of history that should ever have been allowed to repeat itself. And, regrettably, it took so much public pressure for any sense of a feeling of remorse to be seen as flowing from the corridors of government. Leadership emerges strongly, therefore, as an unavoidable issue.