Independence Requires Integrity

by Andrew Allen

In 1962, Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante announced that Jamaica, fed up with colonialism and tired of the ill-fated Federation of the West Indies, would "go it alone" straight to outright independence. In so doing, he set a tone for the whole region, with Trinidad, Guyana and Barbados following in rapid succession.

Today, Jamaica is charting its own independent course, handling its own affairs and managing its own institutions. Well, kind of. You see, with crime now virtually out of control, and politicians heavily compromised and lacking any credibility in their efforts to stop it, Jamaica has just contracted the services of a senior Scotland Yard officer to oversee the restoration of law and order to the island.

Of course, the crime wave is not exactly new. Halfway through its independent history, during the now infamous 1980 election campaign, Jamaica earned itself a reputation for political violence that it has never quite shaken. Back then, politicians on both sides made use of politicised gangsters, or "edons", in winning hearts and minds in the so-called "garrison" constituencies of urban Kingston.

Today, the dons (some of them still politically connected) are a sad symbol of an independent Jamaica. They control a global drug trade, sending forth cocaine-laden "emules" to countries near and far. Their reign has earned their countrymen the humiliation of visa restrictions for travel even to the UK (the ex-mother country) as well as the neighbouring Cayman Islands, which were once governed as part of Jamaica and looked upon her as a big sister colony.

That politicians are part of the problem is obvious from the continued attendance of senior politicians at the lavish funerals of gunned-down underworld figures from their urban constituencies.

In the latest case, where the murder victim was a widely-known gay activist, politicians clearly bear part of the responsibility for adding to Jamaica's notoriously homophobic popular culture. In the 1997 elections, both prime ministerial contenders engaged in underhanded barbs about their opponent's sexuality and supposed lack of manliness.

In a humiliating indictment of Jamaica's ability to govern itself independently among the sisterhood of civilised nations, Mark Shields, the Scotland Yard detective brought in to restore credibility to "independent" Jamaica's police force, now concedes that the once-admired Jamaica Constabulary cannot be trusted to investigate the matter objectively without significant outside assistance.

Meanwhile, in Trinidad and Tobago, a wave of gun violence and kidnapping has forced the government of that oil-rich Caribbean country to seek the assistance of both British and American law enforcement agencies.

Corruption within the police force and at all levels of society has given criminal gangs a sense of impunity that governments, forever locked in their myopic, race-based tribal politics, have been unable or unwilling to confront.

So Trinidad, too, after more than 40 years of independence, has run humiliatingly back to master, looking for help in running itself.

Independence on paper means nothing if a nation cannot guarantee the safety of its citizens and the basic integrity and "workability" of its institutions. After a generation of independence, those countries that are serious about succeeding have not only maintained the integrity of their inherited institutions, but have developed and grown new ones, even better suited to their independent needs and circumstances.

Hence, Singapore has not only managed to maintain the law and order inherited from British colonial rule, but has substantially improved on it, with its own model of development and planning that is ideally suited to an independent city state.

This is why it has felt confident enough to depart from British norms of the "rule of law" and to develop its own, shrugging off colonialist gripes about its different cultural attitude toward collective/individual rights. Singapore needs no help to govern herself, and that alone is her licence to tell the world (colonial master included) to push off.

Meanwhile, in the case of both Jamaica and Trinidad, after more than 40 years of "going it alone", neither has been able even to maintain the effectiveness and credibility of even their primary institutions of state order. Forget wars, insurgencies or foreign intrigues: both have needed help in staying afloat under the pressures of mere everyday criminality. How sad!

Here in the Bahamas, our problems are thankfully on a very different scale than that of our larger, more complex and less affluent neighbours. However, on a number of questions of national importance, Bahamian politicians have, like their counterparts in the Caribbean, shown a dangerous tendency to place political expediency above the integrity of some of the institutions that we inherited at independence. Two areas, discrimination and the independence of the public service, stand out.

Having begun independent life with a partly discriminatory constitution, our politicians have shown little appetite for confronting Christian bigotry where it has (often) arisen. State occasions, public educational institutions and "secular" events of all kinds have come to resemble negro spirituals, while instances of outright discrimination (such as against rastafarian students at COB) have failed to attract the kind of condemnation that they should in any civilised country with a healthy civil society.

In terms of law and order, while we have maintained a fairly competent police force, instances of overly deferential treatment of political leaders are still disturbingly common. Most recently, an apparently overly eager member of the Prime Minister's own police detail was alleged to have roughed-up a well known cameraman at a rally.

Surprisingly, this kind of behaviour became endemic (and almost acceptable) throughout the public service under the long, unbroken PLP government of 1967 to 1992. Political bias in carrying out institutional duties was something that affected institutions ranging from the police to the Broadcasting Corporation and even BaTelCo.

While the jury is still out on the present Prime Minister's promise to end the patronage/victimisation tendencies within his own party, the legacy of damage already done by his PLP predecessor is all around. This columnist has had senior civil servants contact him in a somewhat menacing manner after apparently slighting their ministerial masters in this column.

It remains to be seen whether we in the Bahamas will be let down by our politicians to the point where, like Jamaica and Trinidad, we need to call in help to run ourselves day-to-day.