One D and four Gs: Dudus, garrisons, Golding, good governance?

News reports, commentaries and opinion pieces on contemporary events in the press are often considered first drafts of history. This is true to the extent that all the information is never available in the heat of the moment. So, for instance, there is a 30-year bar on confidential deliberations of state. We shall not, for now, know of communications between the US and Jamaican governments on the matter of Christopher 'Dudus' Coke's pending extradition to New York to stand trial, having achieved the unenviable tag 'drug kingpin'.

We do, however, have sufficient information to piece together elements of reality, so badly mismanaged, that have led to terrible waste of human life and immediate deconstruction of Jamaica's fragile, faltering steps to fix our economy; not to mention the glimpse of a potentially better future for our population.

In August 2009, the US requested Coke's extradition. This was denied. It was not put through the requisite legal procedures because critical evidence was said to be tainted - illegally obtained. Nine months later, with no apparent change in these circumstances, our prime minister sanctions extradition proceedings and an arrest warrant is issued. Attempts to execute this warrant created four days of siege in a military/police operation to combat marauding criminal elements whose objective seems to be Coke's protection. As this is written, at least 44 lives have been lost. Forty-four weapons have not been retrieved. Perhaps some of the dead were not combatant criminals. Perhaps others took their weapons and fled. Who knows?

Edge of the precipice

From the standpoint of the Jamaican nation, handling of this whole episode, the set of decisions taken by the main protagonists - the Government and JLP on the one hand, led by Prime Minister Golding, and alleged drug kingpin Dudus on the other, warrants but one truly valid description: unadulterated, or rather unmitigated, completely unwise, dangerous and sadly but entirely predictable, deadly folly. To an outside observer, the whole shebang may appear inexplicable. Not so. The simple truth is that garrison politics inexorably led us to this edge of the precipice as a state and society.

More than 30 years ago, Carl Stone, my late colleague to whom Jamaican society still owes a debt of gratitude for our fragile, damaged democracy, expressed fear about the nexus between criminality and politics. He worried that "what started in garrison communities could easily be extended to the national level, in which we all become hostages to warlords and leaders using violence as an organising principle". Violence, as an organising principle, has finally become an undeniable reality. We can walk around like zombies in denial about it no longer, it is in the open.

A friend writing from New York and commenting on Franklin Johnston's ('Two-faced Golding, vile senators, a corrupt state', Jamaica Observer, May 21, 2010) candid view of Golding's failings raises the question of fear. He must, he says, "respect, admire and commend the man, although ensconced in the security of a UK hideaway he has little to fear." He speaks of a column in a newspaper, so op-ed colum-nists and journalists have to fear. But this is mild. Peter Phillips has been threatened, so have RJR news reporters. God knows who else. MPs ignobly scampered from their cars into Gordon House. Our former and current prime ministers, lords of the garrisons, dare not, it appears, do a walkabout of their former and current constituency! The political ombudsman, public defender and religious leaders take their place. This is the reality. The foreign press willingly risks describing spades. We'll stop and listen now, won't we?

But why has Stone's terrible fear come to pass? The fact is, our Chief Servant, 'Driva' Bruce Golding, presents an appearance more of a creature of contending forces, not the embodiment of the set of guiding principles [his NDM sojourn] and a vision for self and country that he is impatient to implement. For his return to the JLP, there were complicated and drawn-out negotiations before he was able take his place in Parliament and become the effective 'leader'. Dudus, it is said, blocked the proposal of JLP stalwart and Seaga protégé, Ms Babsy Grange, as member of parliament for West Kingston; Golding, it is said, was his choice. It appears that from the very beginning he has been unable to develop that aura of leadership associated with his predecessors Bustamante, Shearer and Seaga, who were seen as 'undisputed leader'; even the description 'leader' among equals now seems stretched. This must, in part, be a result of his razor-thin majority in Parliament but competition with 'President' Dudus couldn't have helped.

Here are the plain facts that were apparently either mis-understood or overlooked. First, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips' representation of a foreign entity had to be in the public domain. It could not be kept secret. JLP and seasoned lawyer Harold Brady should have known this. Coke and his lawyers, Prime Minister Golding and JLP strategists must also have known that, given the Shower Posse's unique tactic of no discrimination between law-enforcement officers and gangland rivals and the drug-kingpin designation meant the US government would not relent. Resistance was futile and could only lead to a tremendous backlash, as it has done, for Jamaica.

It is now being said that Coke, recalling the fate of his late father, vaporised by a white flash in his jail cell and older brother allegedly shot by police, prefers surrender to US authorities than a cell in a Jamaican jail. So what was the purpose of the nine-month stand-off? What was the purpose of the folly of the claim or admission that Bruce Golding puts party first? Why must junior minister Ronald Robinson take the fall as scapegoat? Were the consequences not so horrible, this could only be described as a comedy of errors. Yet the crisis, the mayhem, the enforced jolt to emerge from denial of the garrison cancer, the call of the dead, may yet cause Jamaican society to demand of our politicians that they cauterise it, once and for all.

wilbe65@yahoo.com