Jamaica may be a broken democracy

THE EDITOR, Sir:

I don’t know where to start, Everald Warmington’s ill-educated gaffe about Mark Golding being too light-skinned to be prime minister, or the hypocrisy of the People’s National Party (PNP) when Lothan Cousins made a similar gaffe about black people should only vote for the PNP and that anyone who does vote for the JLP is a “confused Comrade”, or the lack of an impeachment bill or code of conduct or any rules for these cowboy politicians, or one of Robert Montague’s remarks about “shielding” the prime minister from criticism, which is less talked about than the rantings of Everald Warmington but a bit more concerning.

Montague’s speech seems to fly right in the face of one of the core mechanics of democracy – criticism. The best feedback a leader gets is when something is wrong and needs to be fixed. It is hard to pretend like everything is rosy with Jamaica. While some critics will just be critics for the sake of criticism, a fair majority of critics have valid points that should be taken note of, should we want to move beyond our problems such as crime and corruption, which feed into each other, an economy that pays in meagre amounts of devalued Jamaican dollar and tells you to buy imported food in US dollars, a country where the middle class has all but faded, the second highest human capital flight in the world, among other things that make us teeter on the brink of looking like Haiti or Venezuela, or other places we wouldn’t want to visit.

The very question of Jamaica being a fully functional or flawed democracy is once again in the spotlight. Should I call Russia, where President Vladimir Putin has no term limits (other than the one he set on himself), coddled by ‘yes men’ with the only opposition to him, Alexei Navalny, in jail alongside anti-war protesters against the war in Ukraine, a fully functional democracy? He has to remove a fair amount of his constitutional powers, write in term limits, free his opposition and lend an ear to critics, to start looking like a functional liberal democracy. With that said, looking at our governance, we might be on a slippery slope if we’re not careful.

While I think that there are too many areas Prime Minister Andrew Holness needs to improve on to even make me consider voting in my life, it may be convenient to use strongman politics, where the party rallies around one man. But, if we go by Donald Trump and the Republican Party, it is a cautionary tale that the strongman politics only works so long as that strongman is popular and alive. This is an unsustainable way to run a political party, much less a country with people of different backgrounds, needs, wants and agendas, including those that differ from that party.

MARCUS WHITE