Beyond the garrisons

I titled my column last week 'Samfie politics and bounceback' and I ended with these words: "In the meantime, the garrison story come up to bump! The mother of all garrisons has barricaded itself, and will not easily give up its don. The father of all garrisons is secure with his national honours and his sinecure. Is there any other way that this story could have ended?"

Garrison story come up to bump indeed! Bounceback indeed! History will absolve neither those who created these zones of injustice nor those who stood by and watched. In years to come when we have emancipated ourselves from the slavery of garrison politics, and the real history of Jamaica is written, it will not be kind to those who knew better but compromised to 'go with the flow', to play along with 'the runnins'.

"Give us vision let we perish," we sing in our national anthem, and vision is exactly what we have lacked. When the garrison architects were doing their planning, how else did they expect the story to develop? Did they believe that they would always have abundant scare benefit and spoils to distribute? Did they believe that their mercenaries would always do their bidding? How did they think giving guns to their political thugs would play out? I have no sympathy for them, now that they claim that the tail is wagging the dog.

Technology focus

In 1954 - eight years before our Independence - the first silicon transistor was produced in the USA, launching the era of electronics. Five years before our Independence, the USSR launched Sputnik I, the first earth-orbiting satellite. The year before our Independence, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into outer space and to orbit the Earth.

With visionary leaders, newly independent Jamaica could have set its sights on becoming the technology capital of the Caribbean, with a highly educated population; instead of borrowing money from the World Bank to build junior secondary schools, we could have built grammar schools and technical schools. But our leaders protected the sugar industry we had inherited from our colonial masters by making sure they had lots of unskilled labour, and they created urban garrisons to secure their political tenure. Our first set of political and private sector leaders have a lot to answer, for we perish in poverty and illiteracy and underdevelopment because of their lack of vision.

Now we must go forward to build a new Jamaica, the one we should have been building these last 50 years. Several initiatives need to be pursued at the same time, for undoing the last half-century is a delicate and complex set of undertakings.

Truth commission

A first task must be to bring our sordid past fully into the open by establishing a 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission' along the lines of the one Nelson Mandela set up in post-apartheid South Africa. We must call upon politicians and garrison staff to come forward and tell all they know that was done. A special act of Parliament needs to be passed to give an amnesty to those who confess; for the sake of history and the future we need to know who did what. The point is not to prosecute and arrest, but TO KNOW, so that we can undo.

From time to time we hear that a police officer has been retired 'in the public interest'. The second step after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is to retire all the tainted politicians and civil servants 'in the public interest'. Those who have been unprincipled enough to create these political garrisons should not be allowed to continue to govern us. And those who knew better and compromised their principles (thereby exposing their moral weakness) should leave public life, lest their future compromises get us into deeper trouble. And any national honours awarded must be revoked, so as not to keep them in disrepute.

The basis of political garrisons is their partisan homogeneity created largely by the Ministry of Housing; the Ministry of Housing must fix the problem, and it cannot be beyond them. They must be able to come up with a system to shuffle the residential deck so that partisan mixing takes place among present tenants. New housing needs to be built on the many derelict vacant lots in the inner city to heterogenise and make inclusive the zones of political exclusion. (To be continued).

Peter Espeut is a rural development sociologist and natural resource manager.