Mark Wignall | Injustice, impatience and community chaos

Dateline: sometime in 2006. Place: Maverly Mountain, close to Sterling Castle Heights. Desmond Anderson just returned from a party late one night and he meets upon his ­assassins. The 50-year-old man is shot dead. The case is still open and unsolved.

Dateline: July 2011. Place: Sterling Castle. A taxi driver from the area, described by many I spoke with as a ‘quiet man’, concocts a plausible story to lure a 12-year-old girl he knows inside his vehicle. He goes off route, takes her to a lonely place, rapes her, bashes her in the head, and, thinking she was dead, crudely buries her in bush and dirt.

The child miraculously recovers. By which time the taxi man has been accompanying the child’s parent to the police station in search of her. The taxi driver is, in quick time, ­collared, arrested, charged, tried, and sentenced to a paltry 12 years behind bars. Twelve measly years.

Dateline: July 2011. Place: Sterling Castle. The taxi man’s father lives in Sterling Castle. For long in the annals of ‘community justice’ in poor communities across Jamaica, there has been an element of ‘ethnic cleansing’ whenever some murders are committed. In that understanding, the father of the taxi man was the devil who spawned the rapist.

Gunmen came for him late one night and blasted him to an eternal dark place. Although one got the sense that not many, including the police, were shedding tears over his end, it ought to be the duty of the police to solve this shooting. For now it is still unsolved.

Dateline: July 2013. Place: Sterling Castle. Forty-year-old Carlton Bryan, a skilled welder, was always smiling and he was always unafraid to offload in many conversations we had, the lows, the highs and the direction he wanted to see his life go.

Late one night at a mansion where he did maintenance duty, he lost his life. He was found early the morning with his throat cut and his hands and feet tightly bound. To date, the case is still unsolved.

In between an odd shooting at Burnside Hill, jitters in Rock Pond, and unreported robberies in the Red Hills division, people in the area have long been of the view that the police are only interested in crimes where wealthy people are the victims.

JUSTICE OR VENGEANCE?

Three days after the little girl, Shantae Skyers, failed to show up at home after leaving school, residents of Sterling Castle and in communities close by were fearing the worst. I visited the Red Hills Police Station and spoke quite informally with men I knew there.

I didn’t get the sense that they were insensitive to the needs of the relatives and the community. At the same time, if urgency was in the MO of the police, it was well hidden from me.

When the child’s body was eventually found, the worst of the worse was painfully realised. Sexually abused, killed, and thrown away like thrash. One cannot weave one’s way inside the collective mind of the Sterling Castle community and determine who were the twisted culprits and who comprised the vast majority who only wanted to exist in peace, contentment, and brotherhood.

Immediately after the child’s partly decomposed body was discovered, the brain cells of many in that community began to trigger bad flashes of high-voltage lightning. In quick time, one man was held and, in that mindset, he was tried and found guilty and had to be put away. They beat him mercilessly and then set him afire.

One person, a main community leader, a self-promoter and a preacher of Christian virtues, suggested on Facebook that the mechanics of killing the man who the community had accused of the gruesome abuse and murder of the innocent child was too painless. The lady suggested that the mob was wrong. They should burn then quench. Then burn again and quench so that the man could feel death creeping upon him at every step of the way.

I have never supported mob violence, not just because it is an entirely lawless and brutal exercise, but moreso because the mob is ­usually devoid of even the most basic level of reasoning. Plus, the virtues I learned from my parents did not include me elevating my personal right to extract vengeance on who did me terrible wrongs. I may want to instigate a mob to mayhem, but I am forced by the virtues making me up to keep it buried inside me.

Tivoli Gardens, under the ­absolute and seemingly ‘benevolent’ leadership of Dudus, had its own internal court system that worked for the community. Justice was immediate, brutal, and sure. Why was this so?

I hate to say it, but many of the people there respected brutality because their brutish lives had made them immune to it even as they feared it. A State has to rise above that level. Way above.

BREEZE INTO THE WIGTON OFFER

I am not at all surprised that the IPO in the Wigton move into the public domain has created such a stir. Months ago when it was internationally acknowledged that the Jamaica Stock Exchange was rated number one for growth and earnings, I heard so-called ‘little people’ talking about buying shares. People like bar owners, shop keepers, and operators of community shops. The Government had been preaching the ‘prosperity’ gospel since the campaign that led up to its narrow victory in early 2016.

In the latest offer, the Government has wisely decided that it is allocating 20 per cent of its shares to ­public sector workers. I use the word ‘wisely’ because it makes sense to give a special window to government workers, seeing that Wigton was initially a government-funded effort in a wind farm.

Eighty per cent will be available to the general public. I know at least two private companies that have offered very soft loans to ­employees who may wish to take up this ­attractive offer at J$0.50 per share.

There is no financial institution that a Jamaican of modest means can park or invest J$10,000 to J$50,000 and earn any interest that makes sense to park it there. So the stock market is becoming that parking garage. Just set it and forget it.

A very important and big sweetener in the offer is the special incentive to those aged 18 to 30, millennials. Those who use $100,000 of their money to purchase 200,000 shares will be allowed to borrow matching funds to support the buying of additional shares.

Many younger Jamaicans have been viewing the economy quite different to how baby boomers and their children have been looking at it. They have to, simply because the investment elements have shifted radically. There is now no easy and guaranteed way like in the not so far-off past where cash-rich people could park their millions then go beach combing and collect easy and huge interest. And invest again while everyone else sucked salt.

The times they are really a changing. It’s a tectonic shift in investment. Wigton is the first project of this magnitude to be privatised and is going to be the template for the divestment of other state-owned assets. Mayberry Investments is the broker retained to offer investors the opportunity to participate in the future growth of Wigton Windfarm Limited by listing the shares on the Jamaica Stock Exchange Main Market.

Wind energy is the way forward for countries like Jamaica. The Wigton offer has opened since April 17 and will close on the first of May. What better way to acquire shares at $0.50 each.

According to Wigton, the ­company’s earnings are in the range of 15 per cent per annum. I am personally going to get involved here by investing a modest $50,000.

- Mark Wignall is a political- and public-affairs analyst. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and mawigsr@gmail.com