Editorial | Fast-tracking the republic

Now that Prime Minister Andrew Holness has directly intimated to a future British sovereign Jamaica’s intention to break with the monarchy and become a republic, we hope that his administration will fast-track the move rather than engage in a long-drawn-out process.

If the formal legislative process starts in short order, and assuming there are no significant hitches, it could conceivably be completed within a year – and certainly in time for Jamaica’s celebration of its 61st anniversary of independence in August 2023. It is regrettable that dithering and indecision will cause the transition to miss this year’s Independence date.

However, Mr Holness should not wait on the completion of this involved and complex constitutional process of disentangling Jamaica from the British Queen as the island’s head of state to do something of practical value and at the same time send a profound signal of the closing of the circle against colonial rule and its residual institutions. He should cause Jamaica to withdraw from the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council as Jamaica’s court of last resort and accede to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), the regional court that Jamaica helped to establish and fund.

Jamaica has long – going back to the 1970s – talked about breaking with the monarchy and becoming a republic. The issue initially stalled on the question of whether the island should become an executive or ceremonial presidency. There is now consensus around the latter. The issue to be resolved is the format to be used by the legislature for choosing the president.

PICK UP THE PACE

While three of Jamaica’s partners in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) – Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Dominica – were already republics, the debate gained new life when Barbados joined that club last November. Indeed, Prime Minister Holness, having done little on the issue in the six years he has been in office, signalled his administration’s intention to pick up the pace with the creation in January of a ministry of legal and constitutional affairs, headed by the former attorney general, Marlene Malahoo Forte.

Ms Malahoo Forte hasn’t yet disclosed a work programme on constitutional reform, or the framework within which she will proceed. So, while it is known that Mr Holness favours a republic, he hasn’t indicated a preferred strategy, or the tactics for getting there. Moreover, his public utterances have left questions about the urgency he attaches to the issue, which, based on the latest polling, is supported by over 60 per cent of Jamaicans.

Last December when former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson said that the matter of how to choose a president could be resolved in a short meeting between the prime minister and the Opposition leader, Mr Holding retorted by saying: “There must not be empty symbolism. It must be genuine. It is what we are doing in our actions and our achievements and what we have done. So, I am building towards the aspirations.”

And last week when he told Prince William that Jamaica had “unresolved” issues – an allusion to the constitutional question – which the prince’s presence provided an opportunity for them “to be placed in context (and) to be put front and centre”, he offered no specific timeline for the break with the monarchy.

He said: “... Jamaica, as you would see, is a country that is very proud of our history, very proud of our people, very proud of what we have achieved. And we are moving on and we intend to attain in short order … and achieve our full ambition as an independent, developed, prosperous country.”

There are questions of whether these statements imply that there are specific things the prime minister wants to achieve or a macroeconomic environment he intends to establish before the transition. We hope that this isn’t the case. The one thing isn’t dependent on the other.

As we have said before, Jamaica repatriating the symbol of its sovereignty and of the country’s aspirations from the head of a dysfunctional Anglo-Germanic family and vesting it in someone founded in Jamaica and chosen by the country’s Parliament isn’t trivial symbolism. It is, in part, a declaration of confidence in ourselves and who we are, why we celebrate our heroes and why the Jamaican state has joined with kith and kin in the Caribbean in demanding reparatory justice from Britain for chattel slavery.

TAKE TIME

However, the constitutional process for bringing home this emblem of Jamaica’s right to stand among the free nations of the world will take time – six months for the bill to amend the Constitution to sit on the table of the House before it is debated and another three months after the debate before a vote is taken. The passage of the bill in both the House and the Senate has to be by a two-thirds majority. After being passed, the bill has to be approved by Jamaicans in a referendum.

We believe that removing the monarchy should be concomitant with the repatriation of the Constitution, by making it an instrument approved by Jamaica’s Parliament rather than an Order in Council by the Queen, signed by an obscure English civil servant, who was unknown to Jamaicans. The process for doing this is similar to that for removing the monarchy.

Meantime, it would require only a vote by two-thirds majority in both houses of Parliament to leave the Privy Council and accede to the CCJ, the highly insulated regional court with a jurisprudence of stellar quality and reputation, developed by judges who look like the people of Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean. At the same time, that important symbolic move would widen and deepen access to the highest tier of the justice system to people who are now largely locked out of it.