Bruce Golding: ‘We have messed up’

Days before the nation marks its 60th anniversary of Independence, former Prime Minister Bruce Golding has acknowledged the failure of successive administrations to fully advance Jamaica’s interests.

“Politicians have their fair share of blame that they have to bear, because we have messed up,” Golding confessed in a recent Gleaner interview.

“In the pursuit of political advantage, we have divided the people more than they would have been divided, so that we have found it so difficult to find common cause,” he added.

Golding said that economic growth totalled 135 per cent since Independence in 1962, three-quarters of which occurred in the first 10 years that followed.

Additionally, more than 45,000 homicides have been recorded since then, with the murder rate moving from one of the lowest, at fewer than four per 100,000, to one of the highest, at 56 per 100,000.

The former prime minister said that while progress has been made in infrastructural development and health, crime and the economy are “significant” sectors in which governments have fallen short and are yet to make up for.

The twin problems delivered black eyes to Golding’s administration, whose tenure was cut short after backlash over his handling of the United States extradition request for gunrunner and drug trafficker Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke in May 2010.

Golding said that he was “unfortunate” to have taken the reins of office at the time he did in September 2007.

The ensuing months saw the collapse of several businesses in the US, triggering a global recession that sent the island back to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

“It’s something that shook the world. Banks and financial institutions collapsed in America, in England, even in Canada and Europe, all over the place. I think perhaps the greatest achievement of that period was the fact that we were able to hold it together.

“We suffered, you know. Bauxite shut down, tourism declined, even remittances went down. Our revenues dropped tremendously. Our export markets dried up, but not one financial institution in Jamaica collapsed,” said Golding.

Still, structural adjustments mandated by the international lending agency heaped pressure on many Jamaicans, thousands of whom are yet to find their footing.

But Golding said a turnaround of the country’s fortunes requires not just leadership, but also followership.

He said degradation in values, behaviour, attitude, civility, conflict resolution, and consensus has also hampered development.

Not since 1998, when the Reggae Boyz qualified for the FIFA World Cup, has the country sung from the same hymn book, the former prime minister reflected.

“We are a fractious society. We beat up on each other. Our inclination, our instinct, is to find reasons to disagree and quarrel; not to find reasons to come together ... ,” he said, adding that the country has failed to create a common goal.

In the absence of that, Golding said, successive governments have failed to get buy-in from the population with each set of plans presented.

“If we can’t get over that, we’re going to be in trouble. More trouble than we’re in right now,” he said.

Quizzed on whether Jamaica may have jumped the gun in pursuing independence, Golding believes that it was the right thing to do.

“Independence is not what we are to blame. What we are to blame is what we made of it. Give the Norman Manleys and the [Alexander] Bustamantes their dues. They prepared us for it,” said Golding.

He said the mission of that generation was to gain political independence, while the focus of their descendants was to achieve economic and social development.

The latter generation, he said, has managed to shed the vestiges of colonialism but has failed to achieve economic development.

“Perhaps because we have failed there, our social environment has deteriorated. When people are poor, social mores and values, social stability, social fabric come under stress,” he mentioned.

kimone.francis@gleanerjm.com