Arnold Bertram, Contributor
THE FOURTH president of the People's National Party (PNP) and seventh Prime Minister of Jamaica will be installed in the first quarter of 2006 to face an extremely challenging agenda of national concerns requiring immediate and comprehensive attention.
These concerns include an economy which, though poised for growth, has only grown marginally since the devaluation and soaring oil prices of 1973, and delivers far less jobs than required by the 50,000 young people coming on the job market annually.
Our prospects are hardly assisted by the fact that the globalised market no longer offers subsidies for our traditional agricultural exports, and we are not yet in a position to exploit the advantages of membership in the Caribbean Single Market and Economy.
On the social side, the degeneration, which is daily manifested in the hatred and revenge associated with the high levels of criminal and domestic violence, is a major cause for concern.
At the root of this social degeneration is an education and training system which inadequately prepares our young people for the world of work or for responsible citizenship. This is further compounded by the increasing incidence of adolescent parents in a home environment that is clearly incapable of inculcating positive values.
A DEAFENING SILENCE
The importance of these issues and their implication for national development requires from each contender for leadership a continuing dialogue with the public. Following the non-appearance at the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica forum, the handlers of the Simpson Miller campaign can hardly expect the electorate to be satisfied with the deafening silence from their candidate.
It is certainly not enough for advisers, deputy advisers, policy makers and assistant policy makers to pronounce on these issues. Each candidate must face the public 'live and direct' and to the best of their ability, articulate the platform on which they intend to base their administration.
In charting a course for national development, platitudes and populism are not a substitute for vision, programme, capacity and fixity of purpose. The modern world is an extremely complex environment and one indicator of just how difficult the road ahead will be is that even in the context of the real progress the country has made in modernising its infrastructure, attracting investment and maintaining its democracy, a real fear still persists about the future.
This fear was most recently articulated by the head of a major financial organisation even as he repatriated super profits. The argument is that the country's institutional strength is not sufficiently developed, and without strong and capable leadership, the fabric of Jamaican society could unravel to place us on the same footing as Haiti within short order.
A JAMAICAN HAITI
Ever since the slave revolt in the last decade of the 18th century, which established Haiti as the first black republic, and its consequent decline from being the wealthiest colony in the world to the poorest nation state, the fear of a 'Jamaican Haiti' has been with us.
In 1788, 60 per cent of France's overseas trade was with San Domingue (Haiti). Indeed, San Domingue's "exports were one third more than those of all of the British West Indies combined; its commerce employed 1,000 ships and 15,000 French sailors". All this wealth was produced by the labour of African slaves.
Faced with the prospect of
ex-slaves presiding over the rebuilding of the richest French colony and asserting their rights as free men, Napoleon set out to re-capture the colony and reimpose slavery, and it was this war with France which drowned the new republic in blood and showed the levels to which mankind could descend.
Unfortunately, Dessalines, who became the first president of the republic, was too consumed with taking revenge for the atrocities committed by the French, committing the young state to repaying "these cannibals war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage".
If Haiti was to be saved, the situation required statesmanship and the far-sightedness of a Touissant L'Ouverture, Abraham Lincoln, and Nelson Mandela.
Revenge, however, is not a policy; it is merely a response and the very antithesis of states-manship.
What was not understood at the time was the extent to which violence and the erosion of the value of life would become endemic to Haitian culture. Even more so than the isolation by the major colonial powers, it was the arbitrary use of power and the internal division and violence which doomed Haiti.
Dessalines himself was consumed by this violence as his own soldiers "cut off the fingers to steal the rings and stripped off the clothing for the sake of the gold lace. The body was dragged for more than a mile into the city, kicked and slashed and stoned by passersby and left to suffer whatever more indignity can to the minds of the citizens of Port-au-Prince".
THE CASE OF JAMAICA
As a wealth-producing colony, Jamaica in the last half of the 18th century was second only to San Domingue. In 1787 alone, 474 ships representing some 86,000 tonnes of shipping cleared Jamaican ports. Such was Jamaica's status in the world then that in 1772, the College of New Jersey and the Academy of New Ark in Delaware petitioned Jamaica for financial assistance.
What differentiated Jamaica from Haiti was the continued relationship with imperial Britain and the extent to which the cultural influence of British parliamentary democracy, classical education, Christianity and cricket dominated the aspirations of the Jamaican people.
It was this cultural imperialism and the reorganisaation of the police after the Morant Bay rebellion, which accounted for the low level of inter-personal violence recorded in the island between 1867 and 1943. It was the birth of the two-party system in the latter years and the fight for political power which ensued that has robbed Jamaica of the social cohesion it requires for economic development.
So when we speak of 'Haitianisation', it is not simply the spectre of dire poverty, but the totality of the disintegration over two centuries of political dictatorship and internecine warfare that we must avoid at all costs. And this requires leadership of the highest calibre.
Of all former slave societies in the Caribbean, Barbados enjoys the highest standard of living.
