The Editor, Sir:

The people of the United States voted for change when they were obviously fed up with the disgraceful way their country was being run. Jamaicans also voted for change for the very same reason, only we have not seen the levels of change that the Americans have.

The US president has developed a strategy in which he first sensitises the American public to the fact that the mess the country is in is not his doing - he inherited it. He then outlines the corrective measures and finally he begins to sell optimism.

Need for broad-based dialogue

Golding can learn a lot from this. While we understand that our new administration faces a raft of problems, he needs to communicate more with the Jamaican people through a weekly broadcast, not the Wednesday night 'petty conversation' but a broad-based dialogue that involves changes that touch the lives of the majority of Jamaicans. It is better that he makes unpopular changes now not later.

We need not regurgitate the facts that he inherited a trillion-dollar debt, scandals and rampant corruption. What we need to see are fundamental changes, in the style of Obama.

Golding must not be timid or cowardly, even with a razor-thin parliamentary lead. He needs to summon the courage to act.

Indebted though it is, the Government must take the lead role in fostering more scientific research and engineering developments. We need to put more energy and organisation into these disciplines as we do into Gibson Relays and track and field events. We cannot stop at manufacturing sugar; we need a refinery; we need canning companies for agricultural produce.

Quarrels over petty things

Holland is a cold country but its roof tops are lined with greenhouses. All over the US we now see solar-cell platforms and these countries have little sunshine. Jamaica desperately needs visionary leaders or we will surely perish, not this quarrelsomeness over petty things.

We have Rhodes scholars being outmanoeuvred by high-school graduates discussing filth, and instead of us unleashing the creativity of the Jamaican people, we are bogged down by pettiness, frivolity and kass-kass.

We are tired of a government that is failing to govern and an opposition that opposes everything, even when its own members are guilty of the said things that it is opposing.

I am, etc.,

MARK CLARKE

mark_clarke9@yahoo.com

Siloah PO, St Elizabeth