Editorial | Mobilising for values

Hopefully, Howard Mitchell has hit upon the formula to resurrect and sustain one of Jamaica’s most urgent needs: a massive effort at social re-engineering, which we have generally referred to as a campaign for values and attitudes.

Mr Mitchell, a lawyer, businessman and irreverent gadfly of the lazy, the pompous and underachieving political elite, is also a former president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ). Last week he was inducted into that organisation’s Hall of Fame – a thoroughly deserved accolade.

Apart from marking Mr Mitchell’s achievements for posterity, the signal outcome of the function was his speech – bits of which critics may claim to have been dystopian – in which he identified the urgency of a sustained assault against Jamaica’s pell-mell plunge towards the social abyss.

That of itself isn’t new. Nearly three decades, against the backdrop of what he used to refer to the increasing “uglification” of Jamaica, the then prime minister, P.J. Patterson – who was in the audience for Mr Mitchell’s honour – launched a national values and attitudes campaign, hoping to stem coarsened behaviour in the island, thus helping to build a politically and socially more tolerant society.

Mr Patterson and his initiative were promptly ridiculed, dismissed as an attempt to apply soft social palliatives to the country’s tough problems. As if the two were mutually exclusive.

ATTEMPTED TO KICK-START

Others, including this newspaper, have since attempted to kick-start variants of the idea with little success. In some respects the idea is weighted down by the baggage imposed on it in the mid-1990s.

Mr Mitchell’s critical contribution to advancing the idea, however, is where he located its future leadership: within civil society and the private sector.

There are two compelling arguments for this. One is that Jamaica’s often tribal politics limits the ability of leaders to pursue broad national projects. Or, as Mr Mitchell said in his speech: “Let’s face facts, our political leaders, adept as they are in messaging prosperity and patronage, find themselves conflicted in carrying a message of peace and love and harmony, while preaching that the other half of the nation are deviant scoundrels, who wish to steal our porridge.”

Second, as is implicit in Mr Mitchell’s remarks, the private sector has a strong economic stake in having a softer, gentler Jamaica with less corruption and fewer murders. In 1994 when Mr Patterson launched his values and attitudes campaign, there were 690 murders in Jamaica. In 2022 the figure was 1,498 and is regularly in that range.

More than seven in 10 Jamaicans believe that they live in a corrupt or very corrupt country, and some estimates that corruption and crime, combined, cost the economy up to $200 billion annually. Nearly half of Jamaicans don’t trust politicians or the legislature, and 43 per cent say they would support a military coup if the intent was to root out corruption.

STARK

Mr Mitchell captured these attitudes in stark, and for some, too discomfiting, terms. He said: “When laws that make up the rulebook by which we function and prosper are mocked, avoided and flouted by leadership; when rules are applied selectively, enforced on the weak, but not the strong, the gate to autocracy is opened. And that spells doom in a society with immature institutions or non-existent values. I am deeply concerned that Jamaica today fits that model.

“We are witnesses an unremitting and atavistic onslaught on our regulatory institutions by other state entities that should be supportive rather than destabilising, and I regret that much of our civil society appears to be either obliviously asleep or compromised by complicity in the efforts of destruction of the social (and) institutional framework of the country…”

We agree with Mr Mitchell that Mr Patterson’s initial stab at a values and attitudes project wasn’t as well designed or managed as it might have been. Indeed, it was too heavily weighted in favour of the spiritual realm, with insufficient attention to the sociological, educational, law enforcement and jurisprudential elements of transformation. It wasn’t obviously multisectoral. And as the political nitpicking and ridicule highlighted, sufficient effort wasn’t put into the obviously difficult job of getting national buy-in. This crisis can’t be fixed merely with jackbooted law enforcement.

A new campaign to repair how Jamaicans engage with each other and ensure that the country’s institutions work in favour of the majority, rather than the few, has to address those shortcomings. And it has to be a genuine national movement. The JAMAL movement, the literacy campaign of the 1970s, when thousands of educated Jamaicans were mobilised to teach others who couldn’t read and/or write, offers a broad model.

This newspaper, therefore, hopes that the business and civil society leaders (influencers, Mr Mitchell called them) who have heard his arguments will act on them. The good thing is that Mr Mitchell enjoys the advantage of being also able to speak directly to these leaders.

As he said: “It is our mission to work collaboratively to push back the negative forces and promote values that build and strengthen. The days of taking what we are given and leaving it to others to build in their own image a society that does not reflect the tremendous good that is in us, that staples our true destiny – those days must be left behind us…”