This is the final part in the three-part series looking at rogue leadership in Jamaica. Part one appeared Sunday, October 24, and part two on Wednesday, October 27.
Hume Johnson, Contributor
THE 'BUY a crowd' phenomenon expresses itself in social protest whereby 'generals' orchestrate protest action on behalf of fellow generals or 'shottas' who may have been detained, shot or killed by the police. Paradoxically, protesters are not paid. Instead, they are rounded up and ordered out unto the streets to display hosti-lity against what may sometimes be legitimate police action.
In many instances, community members are not in support of this activity or extra-legal actors on whose behalf they demonstrate but they come out in protest for fear of their lives.
Operating in like fashion to the Italian Mafia's 'omerta' (silence), 'informer-phobia', on the other hand, is a less visible but a most potent tool in the arsenal of the Jamaican don.
Informer-phobia is a fear of providing or being perceived as providing information to state authority, particularly the police and, increasingly, to journalists. Extra-legal activities often go unreported because community members fear the consequences, which may include being 'burnt out' of your home, or death.
Aided by the cultural censure of the act of 'informing', informer-phobia covers conversing (personally or via telephone) with a police or visiting a police station as well as the very act of 'getting involved' in the legal system. This can range from being a witness to a crime, giving statements to the police, pressing charges, assuming jury duty or attending court to give testimony.
On my own visit to the inner city, it became clear to me that the leadership of a particular garrison community may forbid deviant acts in his community but tacitly allows its perpetration in rival communities. In well-publicised instances, these deviant actions are also perpetrated by competing forces within the same communities between, in a sense, guardians of the 'one order' authority system and those effectively mounting a resistance to it. Such circumstances suggest that the 'refreshingly crime-free' social climate that some commentators speak so highly of is, in reality, engineered, precarious and for all intents and purposes, temporal.
LEADERSHIP AND COMMUNITY CIVIL VALUES
A tight communal solidarity and inter-community cohesion is evident in many of Jamaica's urban counter-societies but it is highly strategic and situation dependent. It serves as host to defiant rogue leaders who utilise the social space of the commu-nity to launch indefensible actions in the pursuit of wealth, power and prestige and to provide shotta-commanders with elusive passage through rival communities and safe havens against the police. That residents live in ircumstances where it is impossible to have a neighbour with a different political affiliation, stage social events without the consent of dons and interact normally with the police is to mock the real meaning of solidarity. Such a political atmosphere not only attracts hostility and foster extremism but it nullifies genuine attempts at collective deliberation, negotiation and the autonomous engagement of citizens for common, non-partisan action.
This is not to ignore or undermine relevant phenomena such as renegade popular action undertaken by residents to express alienation, anger and frustration with the condition of their lives and to lend tacit and active moral support to the defiant leaders among them.
However, by virtue of the 'ghetto protest' sometimes 'manufactured' emotion and its execution on a foundation of fear (of the don), it makes a liar of civic action. In other words, despite possessing an obvious leader/negotiator (dons) and a political agenda (daily survival, employment, proper housing for residents), residents of the militarised garrison communities lack genuine civic engagement through which to collectively and legitimately voice and resolve their dilemmas at a political level.
MISUSED THEIR CIVIC POWER
By retreating from the values, norms and authority systems of the wider state structure and trading them for those of lesser authorities, a large contingent of garrison dwellers have shelved their political rights and misused their civic power. The result has been a widespread normalising and acceptance of a range of negative attitudes,values and behaviour norms, including the gamut of extra-legal activities, cruelty, aggression and a belief in the right to live free of official surveillance and modern social control.
The very presence of rogue actors (thugs and gangs) in the society and the nature of their activities underscore the present security and public safety dilemma Jamaica now confronts. The encroachment of rogue actors on communities, their capacity to interweave themselves within social spaces and traverse easily between the boundaries of legality and extra-legality is now a fundamental anxiety for civil society.
The attendant development of rogue leadership is even more problematic. This is because rogue actors are deriving increasing legitimacy from a triumvirate of powerful sources widespread support from their client following, the amassing of tremendous wealth and significantly their potent intersection with politics and state-level political negotiation. The cozy symbiotic relationship which has developed for more than half a century between Jamaican politicians and community dons/area leaders clearly requires much more than rhetoric to shatter.
POLITICAL REALITY
'Operation Kingfish' cannot ignore this political reality. After all, if political parties are to be viewed as a vital part of the functioning of the state as well as a necessary mobilising element of an engaged civil society, then those within its employ cannot serve to undermine it.
In the absence of adequate, active, effective and non-partisan civil society organisations and groups working in the inner city, dons have managed to eclipse the traditional notion of 'area leadership', position themselves as civic leaders within the community and install contradictory values and norms. Political and civil society scholarship is now compelled to seek answers to the following hard questions: Can dons belong in Jamaica's classification of civil society? Are rogue actors to be accepted as legitimate purveyors of civil leadership? How can Jamaican political scholarship reconcile the phenomenon of the increasingly blurred line between 'civil' and 'uncivil' society that rogue leadership in the Jamaican context ultimately personifies?
Hume N. Johnson is a doctoral student in political science & public policy at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand.
