The challenges of an independent Jamaica

RAULSTON NEMBHARD




WE are just two years shy of celebrating our 50th year of political independence from Britain. When the Union Jack was lowered on August 6, 1962 and the Jamaican flag raised in its place, there was a surge of pride that we could now become the builders of our own destiny. We stepped out boldly, if not brashly, filled with a sense of optimism as to what we could build.

We did not place any limits on our innate capacities to build a great nation; the future beckoned and we were willing - if naively - to place Jamaica on the map and to make of her a nation with which the world would reckon. We were going to forge ahead, no matter the obstacles. If we stumbled, it was not because we had lost that initial vision but that we were confronted with the predilections of the newly independent in seeking to take responsibility for our own lives and destinies.

Despite the initial optimism we felt as a nation, an honest reflection on where we have come over the past 48 years must leave us deeply concerned about our status as a free society and to wonder where all this independence has gone. A further question may be, if we are truly independent, whose independence has it been? That of the vast majority of our people who continue to bear a disproportionate part of the burden for building this society (the have-nots), or that of the few (the haves) who have sought to govern and exploit them in their own thirst for power — political, economic and intellectual power?

We have come to realise, and sometimes shockingly so, that building a strong, independent nation is not predicated on wishful thinking, or on the capricious behaviour of those we have elected over the years to conduct our business. We are far from being a politically mature nation. We have failed to understand the consensus that should exist between the governed and their governors and that which should redound to good governance. We have simply ignored the time-honoured declaration of Thomas Jefferson to which we have to return constantly to remind ourselves of the basic foundation of good government -- governments which function with the consent of the governed. In that Declaration of American Independence, Jefferson made it known in a flash of brilliance which, as it turned out, was a characteristic of his, that governments exist to secure and promote the rights of people and that prominent among these rights is the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

A nation that has slaughtered close to 2,000 of its people yearly for almost the last decade can hardly be described as a nation that respects the right to life. And I am talking here not only about citizens killing citizens, but extra-judicial killings by agents of the state. As to liberty, how truly free are we to live our lives in the wholesome fashion that Jefferson envisaged? There can be no liberty where there is no justice. Human freedom is constrained by injustice, especially when it is directed to the citizen from the state. When this happens, the citizen is shackled by the predation of the state and this predation is not just limited to the excesses of the state's agents, but by predatory tax laws that prevent him from keeping and using most of what he earns. In summary, we are still not functioning as a just society; we still judge people by how they look and the kind of community in which they reside. The very black among us get a different treatment tending toward injustice than the very brown among us. There is one set of laws for downtown and another for uptown. To use a phrase of the late Ralph Brown in describing socialism, what we have as independence when it comes to justice is "mouthwater" independence.

As to the pursuit of happiness after 48 years of existence as a nation, you can hardly ask one Jamaican how he is doing without getting the dismal response, "Nutten nah gwaan" or some other variant on a misery index. This is as true of those who are making it as it is of those who are barely surviving. Never mind where we are placed by the world as the "third happiest nation". We know in Jamaica life is tough and it is only the truly resilient who make it. It is true that no country can guarantee a person's happiness. Happiness is a function of private initiative and drive deeply riveted in the choices we make. If you squander opportunities that come your way, you cannot blame others for your own misery. For example, there is no law that says you must stay in an unhappy relationship; that you must become addicted to alcohol or other mind-altering substances; that the only way forward in life is to plant a plot of ganja or to become involved in some other nefarious activity. Each one of us lies in the bed we make and this is made worse if you owe three months' hire-purchase payment on it!

While I understand this, governments must create the ambience in which a thriving, energetic citizenry can embark enterprisingly on projects that can improve their lives and those of their families. This is where I think successive governments since independence have failed the Jamaican people. It is to the building of this kind of society that we have to bend our energies. We have wasted a lot of time and lost ground over the past 48 years. We are still a young nation and we can do better. The question is, will we?

stead6655@aol.com


www.drraulston.com

August 11, 2010

jamaicaobserver

Bahamas Blog International

Jamaica: Not much to show after 50 years of independence

Not much to show after 50 years of independence

By Keeble McFarlane




As Jamaicans everywhere pause to acknowledge 48 years of independence, we should reflect that we joined a bandwagon which had been gathering momentum since the end of one of history's most tumultuous events, the Second World War. With the exception of a strip along the Mediterranean Sea, Africa - the second-largest land mass on earth - remained largely unknown to outsiders until the voyages by European explorers between the 15th and 17th centuries. Egypt, of course, was one of the earliest centres of civilisation and the other countries running west towards the Atlantic had been under European influence since classical times. Two countries escaped the European scramble for Africa in the late 19th century - Ethiopia, which had always been independent, except for a few years of occupation by Italy starting in the 1930s, and Liberia, established by freed slaves from the United States in 1847.

The Europeans came mainly in search of the continent's vast mineral treasures. To this day, about one-third of the world's minerals, including more than half of its diamonds and almost half its gold, are mined in Africa. Other minerals, now highly sought after by the insatiable maw of the electronic factories which churn out cellphones, flat-screen TVs and the like, are now ruthlessly exploited from the continent. At the same time, the birthplace of mankind is ravaged by diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS, while poverty and underdevelopment have kept its teeming millions shackled in a never-ending struggle for mere survival.

Fifty years ago, 17 nations in sub-Saharan Africa gained independence from their European colonists. Fourteen of them were former French colonies and the largest African nation, Nigeria, severed itself from British rule. I recall the excitement some of us felt when as teenagers attending high school we learned about Ghana, the first British colony in Africa to break away from Whitehall's clutches. We looked up to Kwame Nkrumah, who led a non-violent struggle for the independence of the Gold Coast, as the colony was known, achieving that aim in 1957. He was prime minister for the first three years and then declared Ghana a republic in 1960, just as that other large bunch of countries gained their sovereignty.

The new crop of leaders included some worthy contenders - Patrice Lumumba in what was known as the French Congo, Félix Houphouët-Boigny in Ivory Coast, Léopold Senghor in Sénégal and Nnamdi Azikiwe in Nigeria. The new leaders and those who were to come later - like Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Julius Nyerere in Tankanyika (which became Tanzania after merging with the nearby island of Zanzibar), Milton Obote of Uganda and Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Nyasaland, which became Malawi - were all fired up about building a new future for their countries now that they had severed themselves from the suffocating strictures of colonialism.

Resentment of colonialism and resistance against it had begun early in the century in several parts of the world. But the colonial powers held all the cards, controlling the world's industry, banking, methods and means of trade right down to the ships in which the raw materials and manufactured goods moved around. The big powers also spent a lot of time and effort squabbling with one another, and the cataclysm we know as World War II soaked up all the available manpower, raw materials and attention of country after country, including the colonies, which now had to feed bodies into the giant meat-grinding machine that war constitutes.

The war left the colonial powers exhausted, both in spirit and in treasure, and they consequently lost the stomach to fight to continue control of the colonies. One of the weakest of the colonial powers, The Netherlands, never regained its prize colony, the Dutch Indies, which became Indonesia, while the much smaller and far less important holdings in the Caribbean lingered on until relatively recently when they detached themselves while retaining a fairly strong connection to the old colonial centre.

Britain was forced to give up its prized holding, India, which had proved most difficult to handle. But the Africans, who had their own complicated social, linguistic, religious and tribal make-up, were a bit easier to hold on to by the classic methods of divide and conquer. Even here, though, the inexorable forces of enlightenment brought about a trickle of changes after the war. Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia and Morocco led the pack in the 1950s before Ghana in 1957 and Guinea, under Ahmed Sékou Touré, in 1958.

Curiously the earliest global empire was the longest lived - at almost six centuries - and the last to quit Africa. Portuguese seafarers were in the front line of European explorers, poking around the coasts of Africa from the early 1400s. After World War II, Portugal's Fascist strongman, António Salazar, conducted a long and bloody armed effort to hold on to the remnants of his empire. The rebels who overthrew him in 1974 immediately recognised the independence of all Portuguese colonies except Macau, a small enclave on the south coast of China. It eventually went in 1999, by agreement with the government in Beijing.

The African dominoes began falling at an unfortunate time - this was the Cold War, when the United States, together with its supporters and clients were locked in a deadly earnest conflict with the Soviet Union and its satellites and clients. Both big countries were not only arming themselves with the latest diabolical weaponry their scientists could devise, but threw vast amounts of money, arms and threats (veiled and otherwise), at the new countries which emerged from under the cruel yoke of colonialism.

So Africa became a battleground for the two camps, and its newly emergent states paid dearly in lives, stillborn development possibilities and distorted governance. Promising leaders like Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo were eliminated and replaced by corrupt figures such as Joseph Mobutu, who morphed himself into Mobutu Sese Seko, renamed his country Zaïre, siphoned vast sums of money meant to help develop his country, and presided over decades of disaster.

Promising leaders like Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Houphouët-Boigny and Robert Mugabe in Southern Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe after a long and nasty struggle, turned into self-aggrandising tyrants interested only in holding on to power. Instead of building and nurturing vigorous and vibrant democratic political structures, they instead surrounded themselves with sycophants and toadies and eliminated opponents either by intimidation or brutality.

The Cold War eventually ended and outsiders lost interest, except as a place ripe for exploitation. Some countries are engaged in the arduous and painful task of building something in keeping with the aspirations of the early independence figures. A few have managed to remain stable and relatively prosperous. Now there is a new external contender - China - but it is motivated primarily by economic rather than political concerns.

At this half-century mark, there is little to celebrate. Much of the continent's difficulties can be attributed to its colonial heritage. But by the same token, many of Africa's problems are self-inflicted. So instead of celebrating, Africa's extraordinarily complex, complicated and differentiated societies need to examine where they went wrong and generate new ideas on how to tackle the enormous problems they face. They need only take a look across the Atlantic at South America, whose long-battered nations are dynamically devising new political and economic solutions to the demands of the 21st century.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca

August 07, 2010

jamaicaobserver

Bahamas Blog International