Baugh, humbug? And a dead state of emergency

Martin Henry, Contributor

When both this column and I were considerably younger, a certain minister of health tracked me on the telephone to my desk at work. I had written a piece, 'A long night at the hospital', bitterly complaining about the long wait and shabby treatment experienced at a public hospital to which I had taken a relative for 'emergency' treatment.

I picked up the ringing telephone on my desk and it wasn't a secretary in the usual officious manner seeking to establish identity before the boss would be connected. Ken Baugh himself was on the line to check out, for himself, the situation I had complained about, and to offer an apology.

Baugh is back in Government in an administration that believes it can improve health services by removing user fees on a 'bruk-pocket' budget. But he is now at Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade and is deputy prime minister, positions for which, some would argue, neither training nor personality has prepared him. And his performance as spokesman for the non-resigning prime minister, after that party huddle in Ocho Rios, hasn't helped.

Minister Baugh made his contribution to the largely pointless annual circus of the sectoral debate two Tuesdays ago (July 13). The Budget Debate and the follow-up sectoral (non) debate are pointless circuses because they do nothing to alter substantially public policy, which has been pre-determined elsewhere outside Parliament. And when the country really needs the House of the people's representatives, we get the kind of partisan fiasco to which we were treated last Tuesday (July 20) when the extension of the state of emergency was debated.

A failed state?

The media, following the lead of the public which it serves, have been tuning out the Sectoral Debate, recognising that there are better uses of column inches and broadcast minutes. This newspaper, circumventing the platitudinous reporting by the minister of foreign affairs and foreign trade on such things as diplomacy and national security, the stalled CARICOM, and bilateral and regional development, in all of 250 words, zeroed in on the most important thing that Dr Ken Baugh might have said in his 32-page address to bored fellow parliamentarians: 'Baugh laments Government failure to boost development' (Gleaner, Thursday, July 15).

'Deputy Prime Minister Dr Ken Baugh has lamented the failure of successive administrations to find a workable economic plan for the sustained economic plan for the sustained development of the country.'

This has been the supreme tragedy of our Independence, the 48th anniversary of which is just around the corner. Trolling through the decades and through the administrations, including those formed by his own party, Baugh concluded that several initiatives have been pursued, some of which should have brought us success, but success has not been achieved. "Jamaica", he said, "has never been successful in correcting the (negative) legacies of its past ... ." But this was precisely what the Five-Year Independence Development Plan, 1963-1968, set out to do.

There have been some successes, but the failures of government are too obvious to miss. The treason - the threats to the state - of our politics and political parties is too large and long not to notice.

The murdered state of emergency is a potent index of the failure of the state to discharge properly some of its most basic duties to its citizens, and for reasons not caused by external exigencies beyond reasonable control. In complex systems, there are multitudes of factors affecting performance. Nobody can monitor all of them, at least not all at once. What is needed are a handful of easily monitored critical index factors, which can give a pretty accurate snapshot on performance.

Security and protection

And once we strip down Government to its fundamental functions, the critical index factors of performance are easy to identify. One of them has to be security - the protection of life and property. In 1960, there were 60 murders, 50 years later, last year, 2010, there were 1,680. The murder rate has escalated from around three per 100,000 then to 62 per 100,000 today, a 20-fold increase, which has to be the largest growth in the world. And the reasons are not deeply embedded in the inner recesses of criminological analyses.

Ken Baugh and we are agreed, supported by numerous reports and studies, that the politicisation of crime and the criminalisation of politics have played leading roles, "with the most vulgar and dysfunctional manifestation of political tribalism [being] the development of 'the garrison' within constituencies" (Report of the National Committee on Political Tribalism, 1997).

A goal of the most recent state of emergency was to dismantle criminal gangs and to reduce crime, following upon executing the arrest for extradition of the don for the mother of all garrisons. And murders have shown a downward trend in pretty dramatic fashion in the two months of the state of emergency, although exact cause and effect is difficult to establish.

The two previous states of emergency, like this one, were directly linked to the dirty politics of the country, and the link between politics and criminality, which have helped so much to hamper the development potential of the country which Ken Baugh was lamenting.

The West Kingston state of emergency in 1966 was triggered by political violence in a constituency held by a Cabinet minister in the Bustamante government, and a principal architect of the Five-Year Independence Development Plan, which offered such promise for a better Jamaica. The 1976 state of emergency was called by the first Michael Manley government, as a response to escalating political violence, which was held to be posing a threat to the state.

The intransigence of both Government and Opposition in last Tuesday's debate for the extension of the 2010 state of emergency exposed much of what is wrong with our anti-development politics. The vast majority of Jamaicans seem in favour of an extension of the state of emergency. Even Tivoli Gardens residents, who had borne the brunt of the security operations, and many displaying genetic hostility to the security forces, wanted the state of emergency extended, The Gleaner has reported.

The majority is not always right. And, as a serious constitutionalist, watchful against any encroachments upon the rights and freedoms of citizens, I have very mixed feelings while supporting the extension. But it is not the collapse of the state of emergency last Tuesday that is the main issue here. It is the manner in which it collapsed. In a nasty show of partisan politics, at its worst, the PNP Opposition spitefully abstained from the vote, and the JLP Government, having stupidly miscalculated its numbers, refused to consider the proffered 15-day extension the Opposition was willing to support.

No compromise found

In a matter of extraordinary critical concern at a watershed moment in the nation's history, no compromise could be found by the political parties forming Government and Opposition, which then hypocritically retreated from the House of Representatives, where the nation's governance business ought to be done, to call a press conference and make a national broadcast.

Playing politics, succeeding governments have devoted a great deal of time and energy to the wrecking of the economy, leaving Jamaica one of the least-growth and most-indebted country in the world.

So crime has trended down under the state of emergency, which has been shot down, and the dollar is looking up. But Ken Baugh is quite right: Successive administrations have failed to create a peaceful, orderly and productive Jamaican state, which was what independence was to have been about. We are not going to make the advances in this direction that are necessary, to reverse the failures of the past, unless we can clean up our dirty politics, which is, as Minister Baugh may agree, the single biggest obstacle to realising our potential. And he is either just Baugh, humbug and part of the problem, or he can be part of the solution.

Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.