All the right words

By Peter Espeut

In Jamaican politics, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Our new and young prime minister, Andrew Holness, makes a good inauguration speech, saying all the right things, and the tribalists damn it as so much rhetoric, all of which has been said before.

Of course, previous politicians on both sides have said much and delivered little. But if he had delivered a poor speech, the tribalists would have damned him for his youth and inexperience, and would have consigned him to an early political grave.

This is one of the big drawbacks of our tear-down, adversarial politics: each side wants the other to fail, so that they can get in power; and then the other side will seek to tear them down, so they can fail. And where is progress for Jamaica and us Jamaicans in all of this?

The speech was good! I have never heard such a resounding condemnation of garrison politics, and a determination to end it. PM Holness must know he will be judged on how his performance matches up to his words, so we wait and see. With an election in the air, if he doesn't do something concrete soon, he will be dumped on the scrap heap of history.

Portia in denial

I was disappointed in the opposition leader's response. The front page of Tuesday's Gleaner carried a story where she appears to deny that garrisons even exist: "'Garrison' suggests soldiers, guns, bad barriers. I think we need to get away from that. We have inner cities now. I would work with any government to transform inner cities into winner cities."

No wonder the PNP has shown so little interest in dismantling garrisons: it believes that they are nothing more than 'inner cities', requiring transformation and renewal. Dudus and his ilk (orange and green) don't exist, I suppose! This is not going to help the credibility of the PNP.

Listening to Mr Holness' speech, I wondered which audience he was playing to: us or the US? Was he trying to convince us Jamaicans that he was serious about dismantling garrisons, or a foreign audience of Jamaica's commitment to changing course with respect to the links between politics and crime?

He took us one step further than just saying that we need a 'Values and Attitudes' campaign. He has zeroed in on the family: fathers must take care of their children, and people must not have more children than they can afford. Many people want the government out of the bedroom; but others are concerned that what happens in the bedroom can cause government spending to skyrocket: more schools needed, more hospitals, and more jobs, jobs, jobs to be provided.

Combine this with his belief that quality education is the solution to many of our social and economic problems (including poverty) and there you have a set of policies and programmes that just might work - and win the next election.

But having been disappointed by so many politicians in the past, so many of us are cynical.

And the PNP - which seemed to be sitting on its hands waiting for victory at the polls to fall into its lap - is clearly running scared; I think the party feels electoral victory slipping away from it. The PNP now may actually have to develop an agenda of policies to propose for implementation, rather than just 'Progressive' principles and ideas.

SAME OLD, SAME OLD

If he thought he was convincing us of his environmental good intentions, Prime Minister Holness fell far short! Modern Jamaican young people are quite aware that there is much more to the environment than concerns about littering, and in this regard our new PM is like an old fogey: no mention of wildlife issues or protected areas, pollution or wetland destruction.

The JLP seems to have abandoned its manifesto promise of a standalone environmental regulatory authority; his new Cabinet still combines Environment with Housing - same old, same old positioning the environment in a ministry where a conflict of interest is created.

He has to do better than this before the next election if he wants the full support of the now generation.

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and environmentalist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.