Although he largely squandered his first two years in office, Bruce Golding still has an opportunity to emerge as an outstanding Jamaica leader and fine prime minister.

Mr Golding has two important things in his favour. First, he speaks of an ideal strategy, suggesting that he has a clear intellectual grasp of the Jamaican condition and the policies that are necessary to extricate the country from its crisis.

Important, too, while he displays pockets of thought, Golding faces an Opposition encased in intellectual turpitude and slothful, directionless leadership. It may be occasionally embolden by the idea of government, but does not, in the current circumstances, relish or wants the job of running the country.

So, Mr Golding has political space within which to do big, creative things and take difficult decisions. He just needs to do them.

The prime minister, however, requires our help, if not sustained prodding; that is, a sustained action from civil society, particular private-sector leadership, to get over his two big constraints. These are - Mr Golding's capacity for clarity of thought, notwithstanding - a personality that is given to dithering; and that he feels constrained to operate within parameters marked by the assumed political interests of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).

Jamaica becoming a failed and rogue state?

It is important, therefore, that civil society and the private sector leave the prime minister and his government in no doubt, if it is not obvious to them, that after 47 years of Independence, Jamaica is rappelling towards becoming a failed and rogue state. The Government's obviously transfixed fear in dealing with America's extradition request for west Kingston businessman/community leader/don, Christopher 'Dudus' Coke, for alleged drug and gunrunning, is a case in point.

The administration says, and perhaps even now believes, that the labyrinth through which it is taking the Americans is merely following the law and protecting the constitutional right of the Jamaican citizen. The better, and more correct, explanation is that it is a manifestation of an element of state capture. The Jamaican state has lost security control over substantial segments of the national territory and has to tip-toe on policy issues that impact those who have influence in those areas, especially if they are tangentially connected to the governing party.

Garrison politics

Private-sector firms that provide the bulk of funding for political parties must withdraw that financing in the absence of clear policies and demonstrable action on the part of the Government and the parties to break their links with garrison politics and its hard men. The task is to win back the national territory.

Civil society must impress on Mr Golding that Jamaica is no longer willing to tolerate an ineffectual, incompetent and corrupt public bureaucracy and that change, including reasserting the appropriate relationship between the civil bureaucracy and the political executive, is a matter of public emergency and must be treated as such. For it may be necessary, for a period, to remove the security of tenure enjoyed by public servants to fully assess the needs of the sector and to infuse it with needed talent,

The modernised and rejuvenated public bureaucracy must be allowed to get on with its job of management with an absence of dabbling by politicians. The political executive must get back to its job of establishing policy - set with broad civic consensus - and holding the bureaucracy accountable for performance.

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