Editorial | CMOC must stand firm

It is possible that Dr Horace Chang, the national security minister, can configure a legal interpretation of the national consensus on crime that justifies his, and by extension the Government’s, disengagement from its oversight process.

But the minister’s defence of his position – a claim that the work of the Crime Monitoring and Oversight Committee (CMOC) was essentially at an end, and that the arrangement was to help ensure calm in the lead-up to the 2020 general election – is a patent, but perhaps unintentional, misrepresentation of at least the spirit of the agreement.

His posture nonetheless runs the risk of undermining efforts at a concord on a matter which most Jamaicans would prefer to have removed from the excesses of political partisanship.

In that regard, this newspaper takes heart from Dr Chang’s assurance that there is no outright “rejection” of the CMOC concept, and his promise of discussion with the group to determine whether the Government will continue to work with the committee, which he says, wrongly in our view, has “adopted their own policy”. The implication of that remark is that CMOC has gone rogue.

A frank airing of the positions must happen now, rather than later.

By most people’s recollection, when the crime consensus agreement was signed in August 2020 between Prime Minister Andrew Holness, the president of the opposition People’s National Party, Dr Peter Phillips, and various civil society and private sector groups, it was against the backdrop of societal calls for bipartisan action against Jamaica’s problem of crime.

AGENDA ITEMS

From a technical standpoint, the agreement lists a number of things to be accomplished by the Government, with timetables up to at least the end of this year. CMOC’s chairman, Lloyd Distant, says that some actually extend to 2024. CMOC, as Prime Minister Holness put it at the time, was established “to oversee the players to ensure what we commit to is what we actually do”. Even on the narrowest reading of the plan, the committee would be functioning at least to the end of 2022 – and probably well after, given that several of the targets are substantially in arrears.

But CMOC was clearly intended to perform more than an accounting exercise and the ticking of boxes. Its job included building “public support for the consensus” and ensuring that the spirit and letter of the agreement was, according to Mr Holness, being “maintained and truthfully followed”.

“That, I believe, is a significant and watershed moment for the country,” Mr Holness said.

It has now emerged that Dr Chang hasn’t attended any of the six CMOC meetings this year, which he says is by design and with the imprimatur of Prime Minister Holness. What is surprising is the minister’s explanation of the Government’s lukewarm engagement with the group.

He said: “CMOC was put together pre-election 2020. It was designed to avoid any divisiveness on policy going into the campaign and it did that, including an agreement that we could use [the] state of public emergency if violence … exceeded 32 per 100,000 and that was just one of the issues. The primary issue was to prevent any serious division going into an election campaign between the political parties, and that happened. Now, we have to look at where we go from here.”

There is disagreement of the meaning of the text committing support for “the use of the military, as permitted by law, in geographic areas where the homicide rate is above 32 per 100,000”, to which Dr Chang drew attention and which the Government interprets as full-throated backing of the imposition of states of public emergency. The opposition rejects that view.

BE MORE ROBUST

Otherwise, until now, no one has seen CMOC other than as one of the multi-stakeholder’s pacts increasingly used in Jamaica to remove some critical national matters from the clutches of contentious partisanship, while ensuring that the Government is held to its undertakings.

These committees, since the first significant deployment of the strategy for Jamaica’s difficult economic reform agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have proven to be effective in building confidence in institutions in which the public held little trust and in holding the Government to account.

We do not accept Minister Chang’s assertion that CMOC, on the basis of the original concept, has “done its job’’ and that its mandate “was achieved”. However, given the importance of the multi-stakeholder approach in dealing with the crisis of crime and keeping at bay the worst cross-currents of partisan politics, while holding all sides to account, we accept the minister’s proposal for talks to settle on whether he and the Government can work what they consider to be CMOC’s new agenda. Failure will be on their – the minister’s and the Government’s – heads.

CMOC, however, mustn’t compromise its integrity or narrow its terms of engagement. If anything, it should be more robust in its analyses of performance targets under the consensus agreement, paying far more attention not only to the quantitative elements of the matrix, but also to its qualitative aspects, especially with respect to the reform of the constabulary.