EDITORIAL - Abandon garrison culture and woo back middle class

Frankly, we expected the transition to the new Government to have been as smooth and seamless as Andrew Holness' elevation to the premiership.

After all, with the potential contenders for Bruce Golding's post as head of the Jamaica Labour Party and prime minister of Jamaica having quickly folded, Mr Holness knew early that his would be an unchallenged run. He had ample time to deliberate on the composition of his Government.

We are surprised, therefore, that on Monday, Mr Holness could publicly name only two members of his Cabinet - the finance minister, Mr Audley Shaw, and the national security minister, Mr Dwight Nelson - both of whom returned to the portfolios they held in Mr Golding's administration. He eventually named the remainder of his Cabinet late yesterday. We hope that this was not a sign of unassuredness or hesitancy on the prime minister's part, and that he was merely taking a little extra time to get it right.

Of course, we appreciate some of the pressures being faced by Mr Holness in putting together his Government as the putative leader of a notoriously fractious party that is about to head into a general election, hoping to take advantage of the bounce that it has received from Mr Holness' ascendancy.

Resist pressures

There are those who will claim that it was their patronage that accounted for the prime minister's rise and/or that it was their agitation that made it clear to Mr Golding that his was a doomed leadership. Some remind, too, that they control key constituencies with battalions of vote-rustling legionnaires. Others will note their closeness to party financiers.

Mr Holness must resist such pressures. In that regard, we remind the prime minister of the critical tenets around which he pledged to Jamaica that his Government would be structured, including dismantling those zones of political exclusion that Jamaicans refer to as garrisons.

The political garrisons manufacture voting bases, held together by muscled goons, and they perpetuate the myth that the gangs of Gordon House, the political parties that alternate in power, govern in the interest of these communities. But as Mr Holness indirectly acknowledged, these mainly poor people are being disenfranchised, robbed of their political, economic and social freedoms.

Hard decisions

Indeed, for all the parties' showy embrace of this group of citizens, they, as the PM noted, "don't necessarily get the same level of service as other citizens". They represent the bulk of the unemployed and have the worst educational outcomes and the nastier end of a bad justice system.

Mr Holness understands that fixing the problem of poverty and fully liberating those held hostage in the political garrisons is, ultimately, as much an economic challenge as it is a political one. Getting the economics right will require taking hard decisions, for which anyone who leads, from Mr Holness' party or the People's National Party, will require a strong mandate.

That is improbable in the context of a bigger disenfranchisement, the Jamaican middle class, or as the prime minister termed them, "independent-minded persons who form an increasingly large percentage of our population who exclude themselves from a process they consider tribal and unthoughtful". More correctly, a corrupt political process deliberately alienated this group.

Happily, Mr Holness appears to appreciate that it's difficult to govern effectively without the intellectual underpinning of the country's middle class. He must stiffen his back against, and send to pasture, those of his side who cling to the old politics.