HAVING SOUNDED his warning last week about the dangers of the political system being further undermined by criminality, Dr. Peter Phillips, Minister of National Security, needs to go further.
He needs to do more than sound warnings and drop hints about the possible links of parliamentary colleagues to criminality in general and the drug trade in particular.
We would expect that, if he, as Minister with portfolio responsibility, and the Commissioner of Police who reports to him have information pointing to such direct links, that they should push for the necessary investigations to take place, so that arrests can be made and the perpetrators brought to justice.
His confirmation of the nexus between drugs and politics would have surprised no one. For years anecdotal reports have surfaced about the inter-linkages of public officials with underworld purveyors of drugs and violence. From as far back as the 70s and 80s, when strident political warfare set the tone of electoral conflict, the linkages hardened, supplanting the stones and bricks of pre-Independence with the guns of Gold Street and other massacres in other political enclaves.
In later years politicians have felt constrained to pay homage to persons of questionable character in church or funeral processions. Those acts to preserve constituency loyalty were also a tacit concession to the emergence of dons and area leaders as surrogate political leaders of several garrison constituencies.
It is that transition, which has coincided with the mushrooming of drug trafficking with international linkages and the criminal infrastructure it has spawned locally. This is the dilemma that the Minister faces for he has portfolio responsibility for the clear and present danger he has partially unmasked in the nation's Parliament.
And that is why we say that he needs to go further. It is not sufficient to tell the nation that there is no chance of delinking Jamaica from the international narcotics trade "if we who are in Parliament lose the moral authority to act against corruption".
To preserve that moral authority the cleansing must begin, first by breaking such links as exist between corrupt politicians and the drug lords.
Having spoken out, the Minister must now act with deliberate speed, drawing on whatever international resources are available to tackle a crisis with tentacles so widely spread and increasingly a threat to this nation.
