Colin Steer, Associate Editor - Opinion

Say it loud and say it often and the validity of your point will be enforced. That seems to be the underlying perspective of many people when engaged in passionate discussions about religion, sport or politics.

The strategy is increasingly being employed in discussions about determining public policy in Jamaica and elsewhere. In the arena of conflicting viewpoints, crusading social and political activists have determined that an important weapon in their arsenal is to seek to dominate public discourse with their points of view. So in the United States, for example, conservatives and liberals have sought either to force their way into arenas traditionally dominated by their opponents or they buy media entities or time to put forward their points of view, with no particular concerns about being balanced or fair. What is important is that their perspective should prevail.

In Jamaica, we have employed similar strategies but those who would rather shout than think would do well to read and reread former Trade Minister Claude Clarke's articles published in the Sunday Gleaner over the last two weeks analysing the dramatic slide in the Jamaican economy and the rise in criminal enterprise.

Unpatriotic naysayers

For years, there has been a tendency to shout down people who urge caution on certain matters of economic and social policy - they are often dubbed unpatriotic naysayers or unsophisticated knaves. So we became enthusiastic supporters of the Butch Stewart-led 'Save The Dollar' initiative in 1992, but have yet to arrest the slide in the value of the Jamaican currency against the US dollar. From J$22 to the US currency at that time to its present J$72 plus to the US dollar, the Jamaican currency has yet to be 'saved'. Yet, business analysts made the rounds of the talk show circuit telling us over many years that the economy was 'on the right track'. Never mind that as Clarke pointed out, manufacturing jobs have all but disappeared and productive enterprise has taken flight.

Amid all of this, the country's appetite for expensive consumer goods has remained insatiated, even though our purchases are not undergirded by the production of goods and services.

And so who is going to call the country to sober thinking where it is not only important to do well, but even more so to be seen to be doing well? Almost the entire society, it seems, is engaged in a dance macabre to the syncopated rhythm from a boom box and loving it no end.

As Clarke pointed out, the rise in criminal enterprise in Jamaica is not disconnected from the decline in the productive sector - not in the sense of poor people being unable to get work and therefore turning to a life crime. Rather that as legitimate businesses suffer under poorly conceived and badly implemented policies, alternative networks of criminal enterprise have thrived in the atmosphere of corruption, cronyism and wheeling and dealing that accompany them.

Foolish beliefs

Many of us, it seems, foolishly believe, as in the current discussions about fighting crime, that we can have good men implement acknowledged bad laws in the hope that we can get a positive result flowing from them. We have celebrated tough cops and tough policing, and then hanged our heads in shame over Kraal - at least some of us at any rate. And we want more and we are going to demand it - loudly and persistently.

We continue to analyse crime in Jamaica as if criminal enterprise is primarily driven by inner-city youth who can be/should be detained 'preventively' to free up would-be witnesses to testify against them. Given the acknowledged corruption in the heart of the Jamaica Constabulary Force, what preventive detention is going to protect the society from the criminal cop? Who is going to detain for 60 or 90 days, the well-heeled or connected criminal in Norbrook or Stony Hill or Billy Dunne, who can afford a 'good lawyer' to represent his interest? If the police cannot conclude their investigations of a criminal suspect over several years, are they going to do so successfully in 90 days because he has been detained - and we have already telegraphed to the rest of the society that probably he will be released shortly because there is no 'hard evidence' against him?

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