Editorial | PSOJ’s sensibilities

This newspaper prefers to assume that the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) has a problem of communication, lest we conclude that it lacks a sense of history and sociological sensibilities.

Having arrived at this position, we are therefore not forced to infer that the PSOJ believes that the human experience and a people’s well being should be compressed into, and expressed only by a country’s gross domestic product (GDP) or labour productivity – as important as these may be to national development.

But this still doesn’t deal with the PSOJ’s communication conundrum: its inability to say with clarity what it intended to do with Jamaica’s Emancipation and Independence day celebrations, or how its ‘clarification’ statement changes people’s interpretation of what it meant in the first place. For stripped of the sophistry and rhetorical overburden, the original offering and the update arrive at the same place – the effective merging of the two events.

The PSOJ is an umbrella business group. While in recent decades it has widened its engagement beyond the financial and macroeconomy, to include community and social projects, its primary obligation is promoting the interests of the island’s private sector.

It emerged recently that the organisation had concerns, which it put to the government, with the timing of the holidays for Emancipation and Independence, on August 1 and August 6, respectively.

The former marks the date in 1838 when slavery was formally abolished in Jamaica; the latter was when Jamaica became an independent nation in 1962 after more than 300 years as a British colony.

TOO FUNDAMENTAL

For decades after Independence, the marking of the two events were essentially merged and observed on the first Monday in August of each year. However, in 1996, a committee established by the government of the day, which was chaired by the academic, public intellectual and cultural activist, Rex Nettleford, proposed that Jamaica return to marking the two events separately.

In their report, the committee said that the merged celebration of the events had “resulted in Independence losing its meaning in terms of the triumph of political determination over colonial subjugation and in terms of the belief forged in the early self-government movement ... that Jamaicans can be creators of their own destiny”.

With respect to Emancipation, the committee argued that the earlier approach had deprived younger Jamaicans, especially those born in the post-Independence period, “of any understanding or appreciation of that great watershed event in civilised living, affecting all of humankind”.

The Nettleford Committee anticipated the concerns that would be raised about lost production and productivity of restoring these two holidays so close to each other. It nonetheless concluded that the events were too fundamental to Jamaica not to be given their separate space.

The PSOJ, in its recent submission to the Government, raised the production issues, as well as the economic loss to the economy having two holidays within five days of each other, although it recognised their crucial role “in celebrating our national identity (and) preserving our cultural heritage”. Workers and companies often bridged the gap between the two events.

The PSOJ’s proposal, therefore, was for a four-day observation/holiday period, starting on a Friday and stretching to Monday. Surveys, the PSOJ said, showed strong support for its proposal.

STRONG PUSHBACK

Not unexpectedly, the PSOJ has received strong pushback from many prominent Jamaicans, particularly people of a nationalist bent and/or those, who, like Chief Justice Bryan Sykes, see value in, and extract value from remembering Emancipation and Independence.

Said the Chief Justice: “It (Emancipation/Independence) is not about, or solely about, an organised weekend-long celebration that could attract tourists to participate in cultural events, concerts and festivals, thereby boosting revenue across various sectors. I would have thought that the emancipation of enslaved persons of African descent, which was, in our case, the antecedent to independence, would warrant more analysis than to be described as a mere five days, encapsulating – I put in that word – Jamaica’s journey from abolition of slavery to the achievement of self-governance.”

Justice Sykes raises a profound challenge to the PSOJ, whose primary defence was that it was misrepresented in claims that it aimed to merge Emancipation and Independence into a single day. The larger point is that under the PSOJ’s scheme, the two events would not be marked at separate and distinct times, but would converge into a single weekend of celebrations. And perhaps reflection.

Further, it is beyond the point how other countries configure their holidays, especially when the events they mark are not the same as Jamaica’s.

There may well be grounds upon which to question how Jamaicans mark Emancipation and Independence. PSOJ, however, didn’t marshal a compelling case.