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Police at a crime scene in Jamaica.Patrick D. Cooper, Contributor
ON FRIDAY, May 15, 2004, more than 28 years after we departed for what we then naively thought would have been a relatively brief period of a year or so our family, now somewhat larger, returned to a country almost unrecognisably different from the one we left.
To our enormous surprise, given the persistent reports of rampant crime, slipping social and education standards and Government incompetence and corruption and, perhaps, my own class prejudices, we also found a country that is, unquestionably, a far better place for the vast majority of its citizens.
That is not to say, of course, that there aren't serious problems. Our arrival coincided with the publication of the Minott Report, which ranked the island's high schools by their performance in 16 core subjects during last year's CXC secondary exams.
The report commanded my rapt attention largely, at least initially, I admit because of massive headlines trumpeting the dismal performance of my alma mater, St. George's College, which for more than a hundred years was one of the island's handful of elite high schools.
Clearly, all is not well with the island's education system; but to put Jamaica's problems into some perspective the same is true for New York City, arguably the world's richest city.
As school districts all over the United States are discovering, the task of preparing children from economically and socially deprived backgrounds to compete in a global village in an information age that places a high premium on cognitive and communication skills, is a formidable and expensive proposition indeed.
On the flip side, high schools that did not exist during my school years, Tivoli Gardens is a particularly notable example, are educating children who, for too long, were completely excluded from any opportunity at even a secondary education.
REVOLUTION UNDER WAY
As the recent World Bank Report pointed out, Jamaica spends six per cent of its GDP on education higher than any country in Latin America and "real expenditure on education has doubled in the last ten years."
For somebody returning after a long absence, perhaps the most powerful evidence that a social revolution is under way in Jamaica is both in the dramatic increase in the number of children one sees on streets all over the country wearing high school uniforms, and in the marked darkening of their complexions.
At my old high school, where Chinese students comprised about a third of the enrolment in the 1950s and 1960s, and with Lebanese and other affluent, light-skinned students were a clear majority of the student body, the demographic shift is almost startling.
Which, of course, explains, at least partially, the sharp drop in performance at St. George's. But this, we must all realize, is an inevitable consequence of dramatically increased access.
There is much, urgent work to be done. But, as the World Bank noted: "International experience shows that improving education outcomes is likely to be a slow and difficult process, and is rendered more complex in Jamaica by the strong linkages of education with poverty and social factors."
Crime and the fear of crime, are still, also, enormously negative factors. They are slowing the return of migrants to Jamaica, increasing the cost of doing business, reducing output and diverting public resources from more productive uses. Jamaica has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world and its recorded drug offences are also among the highest in the world.
PARADOXES
But, in one of the island's many paradoxes, property crimes are relatively low in Jamaica. According to the World Bank, recorded burglaries occur at a rate of 92 per 100,000 in Jamaica, as compared to 1,777 in Dominica, 922 in South Africa and 134 in Mauritius.
This relatively low level of burglaries and the fact that much of the violent crime in Jamaica is currently concentrated in lower income neighbourhoods has sharply reduced the climate of fear that gripped the Corporate area's affluent suburban neighborhoods in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the Liguanea-area neighbourhood, where we stayed while in Kingston, nobody seemed even slightly concerned about crime. Our hostess -- admittedly in a gated community -- kept her doors open while we chatted into the wee hours of the morning.
And, even more tellingly, her younger daughter, a recent graduate of an American university, in the company of her boyfriend, who is doing a postgraduate degree in the States, routinely left home after 10.00 at night to do the things young people do in the U.S. get a bite to eat, go to the movies, etc.
We also heard stories startling to me of "uptown" young people regularly visiting dance halls in places like Matthews Lane and of Japanese women ruling as "dance hall queens" in these once extremely dangerous places. Although we were part of the huge emigration wave of the 1970s and 1980s, our departure, given my position in the ruling People's National Party and my relationship to the Government, had been somewhat unusual.
EMIGRATION
Although I was not the only member of the PNP's hierarchy to emigrate, I was, as far as I know, certainly one of the first. And so a few words here in explanation are perhaps appropriate.
In 1968, after three straight national electoral defeats the 1960 Federal Referendum and the 1962 and 1967 General Elections and with its stalwarts visibly fading, the PNP decided, as part of a renewal plan, to create a "secretariat", full-time employees who would be charged with running the day-to-day operations of the party under the direction of the Central Executive and its elected officers.
At the still tender age of 25, after a brief career in journalism and advertising that had begun in 1964 at The Gleaner, I was hired as the PNP's first full-time public relations officer and as editor of the fledgling New Nation, the PNP's official newspaper.
The five-man secretariat also included Bobby Pickersgill, the finance officer, Ken Chin-Onn, research officer, Leroy Cooke, youth organiser, and Courtney Fletcher, national organiser.
In 1972, after the party's sweeping victory, I had been elected to the National Executive Council and to the Central Executive and had been appointed chairman of the public relations committee, which met with the Prime Minister every Friday morning.
During 1972, as one of three representatives of the PNP, I had attended the party-Cabinet meetings, which were held every Monday morning in the Cabinet room just before the Cabinet meetings began.
These meetings, which generally lasted for about an hour and ostensibly were designed to coordinate the activities of the Government and the party, became instead the first battle in the long and bitter ideological war that would have such disastrous consequences for the country.
While many of us simply wanted to ensure that the party's vital interests were not neglected, it soon became clear that the burgeoning leftist forces had a very different and far more ambitious agenda.
For them, as I soon learned, the question of whether the Cabinet could operate independently of the party was a matter of fundamental ideological importance. In multi-party, democratic societies the established Jamaican model political parties are, necessarily, separate from the Governments to which they give birth.
Governments, regardless of party affiliation, once elected, represent the entire society and are obliged, therefore, to make decisions on that basis.
On the other hand, as the leaders of the left saw it correctly the dominance of the party was a basic precondition for the creation of a genuinely socialist society. By that view, therefore, the proper role of the Government was as a mere instrument of the party's will.
IMPLICATIONS
What was disturbing then, and in retrospect frightening, was how little consideration was given to the enormous implications of what was being considered. That is not to say that the leaders of this movement did not fully understand that the logic of their position led, directly and inevitably, to advocating a one-party state.
They knew, only too well, exactly what they were doing. But, unfortunately, the party as a whole, certainly not before 1976, never openly discussed and therefore never fully understood that the adoption of so-called democratic socialism an oxymoron if ever there was one would result, inevitably, in a vast social upheaval, of a kind and extent unique in Jamaican history.
Although, like most of the younger members of the party hierarchy, I had long been a fervent admirer and supporter of Michael Manley and for years was generally regarded as being on the left wing of the party, I had developed deep reservations, especially after 1974, about the party's direction.
To be continued.
