Dawn Ritch, Contributor
SOMETIMES I have so much fat to fry that I wish I had seven columns a week and two lifetimes. But I'm glad I have neither.
So much in life is safely ignored, but not the testimony of a former policeman now in witness protection, nor the little girl who was at Kraal. A trial for murder is proceeding before a jury in the Home Circuit Court, presided over by the Chief Justice.
Pearnel Charles, Jamaica Labour Party Member of Parliament for North Central Clarendon has done a service to the nation. He pursued the need for justice on radio and elsewhere, about the killings at Kraal by the police. He has served his constituents well, and done credit to his party. Now policemen, including Renato Adams, are being tried for murder.
The testimony so far from this trial, is of guns planted and people begging for their lives. Both witnesses are very brave indeed to take the witness stand. Such courage is owed our gratitude because it doesn't happen often these days. Few are prepared to stand for anything, let alone justice.
STAND UP TO GOV'T
It was symptomatic, therefore, to see on the television news last week, Kingsley Thomas haranguing the dinner guests of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions. He called on unions not to "... sit with Government, but to stand up to them". He cited what was accomplished in Britain when Prime Minister Blair was opposed, and so could not enact exactly-as-proposed terrorism legislation. One would have thought Kingsley Thomas was Paul Bogle and in need of a revolution, but one in which he has played and will play no part.
This is the same man, who as chairman of the National Housing Trust (NHT), where many union heads also sit as board members, allowed Prime Minister Patterson to purloin $5 billion from the NHT, ostensibly for so-called education transformation. Eight months later, the transformation unit is stuttering to a halt, but no one need doubt that the money is being spent just the same.
Kingsley Thomas has a nerve to talk about standing up to prime ministers. Under his watch, NHT money has been put into parks, while Devon House decays and becomes a place of murder, into upscale tourism resorts while the poor go without shelter, and the list goes on and on. He should just leave the country quietly, and the rest of us alone. On television, even Dr. Trevor Munroe looked bemused at his outburst, and that takes some doing. Dr. Munroe is himself perhaps the most famous leopard to ever change its spots in Jamaica.
GUTTER POLITICS
Then there was K. D. Knight, also on television. Out on the trail, Knight left his felt hat at home and wasn't chewing on a cigar, so he thought he could be different to what he always is. At Lyssons in St. Thomas for a campaign meeting to promote Dr. Peter Phillips becoming the next president of the People's National Party, K. D. Knight descended into gutter politics against Mrs. Portia Simpson Miller.
Knight said that the PNP needs leaders who don't have to '... read from a piece of paper' everytime they talk. Ones he said, that "respect Cabinet and attend Cabinet meetings and stay in Cabinet meetings ... one with a good understanding of regional, hemispheric and international affairs ..."op
Well, we all know this is about Portia. So I must say I'm relieved to know that she seems to find some of these Cabinet meetings less than scintillating, for in truth, many of her colleagues can say nothing publicly that they've not said before, so in a private meeting they must be unutterably boring. It's they who should be given a piece of paper to read, and not she.
It should be also noted that Mrs. Simpson Miller is a vice-president of RIAD, the OAS ministerial network of local government and decentralisation. She is the inaugural chairman of the Caribbean Forum of Local Government Ministers. She is also a board member of CIFAL in Atlanta along with people like Andrew Young, and of the Commonwealth Local Government Forum. These are all regional and international positions to which she has been elected.
Dr. Phillips, Minister of Failing Security, needs to try much harder to make an intellectual mark of his own, to say nothing of running a cleaner political campaign.
The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) was desperately trying to make a mark last week as well, and largely did. Their mayors and councillors held a walk or a march on Jamaica House to demand more money for the parish councils. A local government election is on the horizon, and bad roads, garbage and rats islandwide threaten the JLP's control of the parish councils, if perchance the electorate should hold them responsible.
TEAR-GASSED
That the police overreacted and tear-gassed the demonstrators was a political bonanza for the JLP. I must confess however, to a certain perverse satisfaction in knowing that legislators can get gassed for breaking the law, as well as ordinary citizens. It's a pity therefore that Mayor Desmond McKenzie didn't soldier on like the little girl at the Kraal trial, instead not only falling down and whimpering on the side of the road, but allowing himself to be carried off the field like a wounded warrior while the cameras rolled. It left open the question of how much of his apparent distress was real, and how much of it simply for effect. Certainly there was very little public sympathy for a mayor who seems to relish throwing the law at others having the law thrown at him.
It should be noted that councillors get more money to spend than members of parliament. Time and again MP after MP has complained to me about it in private. They are of the view that since their own responsibilities are far greater than that of councillors, their subventions should also be far greater.
Anyway you look at it a whole lot of people on both sides of the House of Parliament and in the parish councils are getting a whole heap of money. Nothing seems to come of it except public forums in which even they ask who is in charge of bushing the roads and cleaning the gullies islandwide. Some of the money, no matter how small, must be enough to clean the drains.
Instead, there have been deaths in Clarendon and Manchester from leptospirosis, a disease fatal to humans and carried by rats. The Public Health Department has only recently acknowledged the epidemic however, and a 'Leptospirosis Task Force' has now been set up, whatever that means. One thing is certain is that it will have meetings and give interviews, but whether or not it stands for anything remains to be seen.
The foolishness which abounds in Jamaica gets very wearying at times. Too many public persons seem to have perfected the art of divisiveness for personal aggrandisement. This makes it all the more remarkable when ordinary Jamaicans, including a child, are prepared to stand up, be counted, and do the right thing no matter how hard.
