Ronald Thwaites | A different state of emergency

Isn’t a state of emergency supposed to jolt us out of complacency and stimulate new consciousness and behaviour?

The most important display we showed off last week to Mr and Mrs William and Kate Mountbatten-Windsor was at the Caribbean Military Technical Training institute in Montego Bay, where unattached young people are trained in the disciplines of employable skills by the Jamaica Defence Force. I read where some 250 youth are being accommodated. The number in such programmes should be at least 25,000.

Skills training, resocialisation and productive work are the antidotes to crippling crime and violence, the school-based mayhem of recent days, the attraction of ‘gangs’, and the atrophy of the national spirit and wastage of resources.

The last time we had full employment in Jamaica was the night before slavery was abolished. How much more proof do we need to mash down the prevailing lie (still underlying much of the Budget Debate) that prosperity can coexist with idleness, low skills, scorning self-restraint, and the placebo of rum and Boom?

And if it would take a limited state of emergency to constrain engagement of all idle youth in such programmes and separate them from hard-core criminals who wield money and power- even, ludicrously, from behind prison walls or boardroom insulations – then it might be worthy of support.

What a difference such an approach is from the fascist-leaning, anti-crime legislation now passing through Parliament.

HOPEFUL ANNOUNCEMENT

It’s not as if we don’t know what to do. Last week, there was the hopeful announcement of a plan to double the cadet corps in high schools, as well as a renewed thrust to form police youth clubs. These are the measures which will deter criminal activity and gradually transform the society into an optimistic, productive community instead of a surly, apathetic and selfish entity. Youth club graduates and cadets normally do not graduate into gang culture.

Except for the self-centred and panic-stricken racist and classist fringes in Jamaican society, most of us will see the worth of these measures. So why is there no mobilisation and sufficient financial support for them? Where is money for them to be found in the Budget? And if not there, where else, or why not? Are we conspirators of our own misfortune?

The squabble between the political parties last week centred around the arithmetic of the Budget and the amount available to avert more hunger, ignorance and distress in this year of pandemic and international economic ‘pop-down’. Why not look at the efficiency of the recurrent budget spend through a zero-budgeting exercise in every ministry, agency and department.

My resolution in Parliament advocating this process lapsed after languishing, undebated, for four years. government was obviously afraid of the political consequences.

MISAPPLIED

My conviction is that zero-budgeting would show that perhaps a quarter of our spend is misapplied, wasted or ‘teefed’. That’s where to find the extra $40 billion which Mark Golding correctly assesses to be needed for social reclamation. To cut it short: in a dangerous economic climate, we are spending on some of the wrong things. Who is examining this?

Senator Webhy is heard wisely urging us to move resolutely towards renewable energy targets, but we are misspending most of our credit to buy petroleum-dependent vehicles. I expected better from the loan practices of credit unions, who clearly have lost their way.

While Don is warning us correctly of what we already know, that imported food prices are escalating, the prevailing social mores encourage the youth to become taxi drivers rather than food producers. But not a word from our leaders. How does that make sense? Remember what happened to the Gadarene herd!

Last, we are begging the Caribbean Examinations Council to tell us what topics they are going to ask in this year’s papers, and, please, could they give us a month more to cram. We need a state of mental emergency to jolt us into admitting that very few could be ready for exit exams this year, and that watering down the standards and fooling ourselves that we can catch up two years of lost learning in a few months is delusion, the consequences of which those with power are inflicting on those who have no choice. This is contempt and wickedness.

“Make justice your aim; redress the wronged, hear the orphan’s plea, defend the widow. Come now, let us set things right, says the Lord.”(Isaiah 1, 17)

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.