August 2, 1838, the day after 'full free' Emancipation, marks the official start of squatting in Jamaica. And also the start of double digit unemployment.

All of Jamaica's big problems have long time-lines attached to them. In recent times I have come into proximity with a number of the youth leaders of the two major political parties, several of them serving as 'objective, fair and balanced' public affairs analysts. They, like their elders in politics, would have us believe that is "the other side dem" mash up Jamaica - and that in very recent times. Opposition party elder and chairman Robert Pickersgill, for example, has made himself even more ridiculous than his infamous declaration that Jamaica would be pothole free by 2003 made him when he recently declared that the past two years were the worst that he had seen in Jamaica. The indictment of this outlandish claim on the prior 18 years should not have so utterly eluded Mr Chairman.

Even 'educated' young people have no real sense of history and of the big historical trend lines which have produced modern Jamaica with its huge successes and equally large failures. With the general population this ignorance is even worse. Talk shows would quickly lose a lot of steam if 'analysis' of the 'failure' of the two-year-old Bruce Golding Government to fix national problems fell off their agenda or the casting of blame on the 18-year long PNP administration.

cross-party workshops

I have taught a course on the social, cultural and economic history of Jamaica to graduate international service learning students with the goal of helping young expats make sense of the 'crazy' present Jamaica in which they do social service. Young political leaders need a course like this delivered in cross-party workshops.

Before we go back to the national problem of squatting, which the current minister of housing says is the living arrangement of an estimated 900,000 persons, or a third of the Jamaican population, let us work with the nation's number-one problem: crime and violence. Every report on the matter has linked crime and violence to politics. The fact of the matter, as I have pointed out in earlier pieces, political violence, which has strongly fed general criminality, began almost with the founding of the political parties. The first commission of enquiry into political violence, prompted by a political mob murder, was the Hearne Commission of 1949, the year of Jamaica's second general election under Universal Adult Suffrage when the PNP [1938] was only 11 years old and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) [1943] a mere six years old.

The introduction of guns in the mid-1960s by both sides was merely an escalation of an established pattern of conflict. Today, in 2009, we are witnesses to the amazing spectacle of a prime minister/Member of Parliament - and government - trapped in the conundrum of the extradition of a garrison community leader, a situation which has its genesis in the 1940s. For good historical reasons, Jamaica has been for years a world leader in homicides, a situation which no government can quickly turn around without radical, trend-breaking approaches. The Jamaica Constabulary Force, formed post-1865 as a para-military suppression force has subsequently been profoundly molded by the escalation of violent criminality, linked to tribal politics, into the brute force Force we know today.

It is not accidental that the public sector wage bill is the second biggest item in a debt-financed Budget. For all of the Independence period, successive governments have made the public service a mopping up device for labour which a weak economy cannot absorb. Low wages for nuff people, many of them under-skilled and party loyalists, plus longstanding political interference with the constitutional independence of the public service, have created a timid, bloated, unresponsive bureaucracy which is regularly an operational obstacle to policy formulation and implementation. Magician Golding now wants to reduce the wage bill without cutting the size of the public service through non-voluntary retrenchment.

Back to squatting and unemployment: On August 1, 1838, some 300,000 black Jamaicans were thrown into freedom without property. Land policy - and education policy - since then, almost without interruption, have been designed to maintain a big pool of low-wage labourers. Virtually all the civil unrest events since 1838 have been over land and wage. A third of the population squatting is probably less now than in earlier times. About a third of the population with, shall we say, low-literacy skills is certainly less than at any other time in the nation's history. But the radical overhaul of land ownership and of education which freedom demanded is yet to happen in this country, despite a litany of promises from administrations going back to at least 1866 when John Peter Grant became the enlightened and energetic governor of Jamaica after the Morant Bay uprising, which was in part a land struggle.

The role of the trade union movement linked to the political parties and therefore to government, a role perhaps inadvertent, but nonetheless real, in maintaining a low-wage, low-skilled, old economy regime must be noted. As a single potent example, The Gleaner's This Day in Our Past feature recently recalled labour leader-turned-prime minister, Alexander Bustamante, vowing to use the power of his Government to fight mechanisation in the sugar industry to save jobs.

cannot create jobs

The old economy, underpinned by the old politics and the old culture, even without a global recession, simply cannot create "jobs, jobs and more jobs", unless of the Crash Programme kind.

Which takes us on to some other major macro-economic trend lines which no recent Government created or has had the will or capacity to reverse: The Debt, Devaluation, Productivity. Jamaica had some debt almost from Independence, but this was manageable. The debt burden exploded in the mid-1970s when the experimentation of the Michael Manley government with democratic socialism drove the Jamaican economy to its knees. Since then, every minister of finance has been really a minister of loans, debt and begging with a steady, continuous growth of the debt burden making Jamaica now one of the most indebted countries in the world by the debt: GDP ratio.

Jamaica converted to a dollar currency in September 1969, exactly 40 years ago, with the Jamaican dollar on par with the US dollar. Since then there has been continuous devaluation, with only the speed varying, to nearly 89:1 today. The fashion, across governments, of blaming world conditions for poor domestic economic performance is at best nonsense and at worse a lie.

political clientelism

We could do more on providing a historical context for the big problems of the macro-economy like the distorting effects of 'political clientelism', big and small, but let us close with one socio-cultural trend line linked to much of our current dilemma. Beginning in the 1960s, or a little earlier, with the recording of Jamaican popular music, the advent of the over-amplified sound system, the sound clash and the rude boy culture, we have arrived at Gaza and Gully.

The music has degenerated, and with it the behaviour it inspires and is inspired by, into abject coarseness and vulgarity. Night noise abuse, even by churches, is now the order of the day as is the roadblock session validated by the political parties while campaigning. The Noise Abatement Act, legislated on top of the old Towns and Communities Act, in response to this social assault, is as vigorously prosecuted as numerous other laws enacted by Parliament for "the peace, order and good government of Jamaica". - Constitution, Section 48(1).

The past, well beyond 1989 to 2009, is very much present and is determining the future along broad, long-running trend lines, like the ones I have outlined, unless the courage and will can be found to learn from history and to defy its projections. The pickneyish blame game and nearsightedness are hardly helpful.

"Magician Golding now wants to reduce the wage bill without cutting the size of the public service through non-voluntary retrenchment."

Martin Henry is a communications consultant who may be reached at medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.