EDITORIAL - Civil society has to lead Jamaica's rescue

A year ago, as the Jamaican Government prevaricated and dithered over America's request for the extradition of reputed gangster Christopher Coke, it was the combined insistence of civil-society organisations that galvanised the administration into action.

It was in the face of their displeasure, too, that Prime Minister Bruce Golding felt compelled to apologise to the country for mishandling the affair, including a commingling of the efforts of the ruling Jamaica Labour Party and those of the State to lobby the American government on the matter.

Further, when Jamaicans didn't believe that the administration and, in particular, Prime Minister Golding, had not told the full truth about the matter, the country's trade unions, the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) and the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce (JCC) stayed away from talks on a social partnership. Churches and human-rights groups joined in venting their dissatisfaction and disaffection.

In the end, Prime Minister Golding was pressured into establishing a commission of enquiry that, whatever the shortcomings of the process, has shed much light on what drove the administration and how it went about decision-making in the Coke matter.

onus on jamaicans

The bottom line: If there is a lesson from the Coke extradition scandal, it is that saving Jamaica from inept and, probably, corrupt political leadership will require active and aggressive engagement from civil society.

It is a point that Jamaica's civil-society groups, particularly the private sector, have long instinctively understood and appreciated but failed to act upon. Or, the private sector, and civil society, more broadly, did not always approach issues from the widest national sphere and very rarely in concert.

There was this assumption that national leadership was best left to politicians. Civil-society groups would individually pay attention to those matters that had specific areas of interest.

This model of discreet intervention might have been good for another era when the world, and the issues that confront leadership, were less complex. Its application is even less efficacious in the Jamaican context of a crisis of leadership: where political parties often operate like crude gangs, assembled merely for the cause of power and partisan control; where parties will resort to muscled roughnecks to keep whole communities in check and to rustle votes; and where party leaders lack the moral authority, and certainly the will, to lead transformation of their organisations and the broader society.

This failure of political leadership tells in the national economy that has stagnated for 40 years, widening urban blight, poor educational performance, high levels of joblessness, and growing poverty. It tells, too, in declining confidence in political leaders; in the democratic process; and in the future of Jamaica, especially among the youth.

Against this dismal backdrop of failed leadership, the rescue of Jamaica demands a new paradigm, starting with recognition of a fact that Jamaica has missed with its too-heavy investment in politics as a narrowly partisan process. That is, politicians and political leaders also require leadership. For good governance is often the consequence of an informed and courageous civil society, establishing agendas and insisting that political leaders do what is right.

Indeed, we have seen this at play when organisations such as the PSOJ, the JCC, Jamaicans For Justice and others demand decency in public office.

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