Ronald Thwaites | Keeping faith with ourselves

The people of the United States of America (USA) paid for my first-rate undergraduate education and there, though a foreigner and in the maelstrom of the disastrous Vietnam War, that great nation tolerated and indeed encouraged my complete freedom of expression and association. I am grateful for their core values.

I am disappointed now. From this distance, I thought of the Biden era as a humane antidote, except in their embrace of abortion, to the crass brutishness of the Thug they succeeded. But who can hold that now when Blinken can contort his conscience over “far too many civilian casualties in Gaza” while uncritically providing the very weaponry to Israel which, unhindered, sprays destruction and death over uncountable thousands of Palestinians who share Abraham’s heritage with their murderers?

WHAT DO WE STAND FOR?

To say that there can be no justification for turning Gaza into the abattoir of civilisation ( just as parts of Israel were ravaged on October 7) implies neither anti-Semitism nor pro-Zionism. Humans can plan to live on the moon and to mine the depths of the ocean, to replace and reproduce human organs. It cannot be conceded that it is inevitable for us to so disrespect our own flesh and blood that we must exterminate the “other” to survive.

All this has big application for considered life in Jamaica. Can we really look to the USA or Britain any more for example or mentorship? Isn’t it time to draw from the crucible of our history and the integrity of our hearts (despite the 1,400 murders and rest of the alms-house treatment of one another) a loud principled response to the Israeli-Palestine bloodletting?

So I applaud the people of South Africa who, like us, know about being dehumanised; and now that the United Nations has proven toothless and the Americans and British complicit, have had recourse to the International Court of Justice to pressure for an immediate ceasefire. It is face-saving for Jamaican morality that the People’s National Party has endorsed the South African stance. They could have gone further and challenged us to join the legal action in some formal way as co-plaintiffs. It is shameful and embarrassing that the government continues to be cagey and ambivalent about this matter. Or is it worse than that?

WHAT IS OUR TRUTH?

To thrive, a democratic nation, however diverse and class-ridden, needs some basic tenets to which we all subscribe and a sense that there are persons and institutions which we can trust to determine important truths affecting our lives. It is a worry that the heavily financed official narratives about things like corruption, trust of the police and whether life is getting better, are being contradicted by repeated surveys of public sentiment and the daily experience of the majority who have difficulty affording good food.

ELECTION TO WHAT END?

We are approaching local government elections thoughtlessly, without any objective evaluation of how efficiently the municipal corporations have performed over the period since last elected. In recent days, the premier parish council, the KSAMC, has been caught complicit once again in the breach of their own development conditions. Amending laws won’t help either. They will be breached or ignored. What about the human factor? Don’t the councillors care about discrediting themselves? And does their supervising ministry not have oversight responsibility to prevent corruption in their branch offices? The prevailing philosophy of getting through at all costs means that “special” help from within the agency becomes the way to get any project approved. The same experience applies in several government departments where staff get paid whether or not good service is delivered.

But there is no public discussion, let alone action, on integrity and accountability in local government and statutory agencies. Why not publish the recipients (not company names) of all contracts involving the expenditure of public funds and disclose beneficiaries and terms of all transactions to do with public land and other assets? I challenge the minister of finance to provide evidence that the gross salary increases have resulted in a decrease of waste and increase of productivity.

So what are the specific deliverables which each municipal corporation commits itself to provide during their upcoming term of office - Garbage collection, road maintenance, street lighting? If these are not provided by those contending for office, what is the benefit of voting? Time is running out. There was a time when Edward Seaga relegated the parish councils to the maintenance of cemeteries. Just check the condition of the said cemeteries now to form your own judgment before voting.

LEAVE THE IC ALONE

Kudos to Delroy Chuck for distancing himself from the intentional and perfidious over-reach of the Integrity Commission Oversight Committee of Parliament, the purpose of which should be to facilitate the Commission to do its work, not for members to squirm about “entrapment” and to spout fatuous nonsense posing as statutory interpretation. All that does is to enlarge the suspicion which the majority of citizens already have about this administration, and by extension, the entire political process. It is not good for the country when the Integrity Commission has to deliver such a hard and deserved ‘buff to the Executive as their response to the Committee has done.

EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP?

Howard Mitchell, delivering the Archbishop Samuel Carter Memorial lecture at Campion College last week, decried the absence of transformative leadership and fellowship in independent Jamaica. He pointed to the grossly unequal and unfocused education system and the cancer of political tribalism as two main inhibitors of the kind of leadership which produces good governance. It remains for institutions of the base; civil society coalitions, churches, non-captive media and syndicalism to spur required changes.

But are these disparate groupings ever going to be strong enough, financially independent and sufficiently united to exert the necessary pressure? And can the institutional scaffolding required to be reformed or created, achieve profound change within the Westminster model of government? Mitchell seems to think so. I have come to doubt it.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.