Portia Faces Life

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Most people who know me are aware that I have been a partisan of Portia Simpson's for a very long time. The reason is simple: I believe that she is the only leader in the People's National Party who really understands what the PNP was founded to achieve and who realises that those original aims and objectives are not only unfulfilled, but in urgent need of fulfilment.

The PNP was always a small people's party despite the propaganda generated by Bustamante's 'dutty shu't' (dirty shirt) rabble-rousing of the 1940s which allowed Ulric Simmonds and almost every other journalistic commentator in Jamaica to label the PNP 'the intellectuals party' or the 'middle-class party' or 'the schoolteachers' party' or even the 'policeman's party'. If that were true, the PNP could never have won an election in Jamaica nor could it have become by the 1960s the natural majority party in the country.

The real point about the PNP is that it began to work to create out of the disinherited masses of Jamaica - the 'labourers', the peasantry and the unemployed, a productive and relatively prosperous community of Jamaicans united to work together for 'the good and welfare' of all. What you might call, perhaps, a 'populist' movement towards a plural society with fair shares for all and no one left out.

Populism has become a dirty word - under the influence of American fundamentalist capitalists and the Washington Consensus of international financial institutions - the IFIs. The World Bank has even paid a West Indian scholar, whose name escapes me at the moment, to write a learned disquisition about the evils of populism. I doubt, however, that any of those bandying the word about recently could provide a coherent definition of 'populism'.

Which is sad, since it is a reputedly fatal affliction from which Portia and so many others of us suffer. Writing before last week's election, in my column published last Sunday, I referred to one of the priorities I believed our next PM would have to confront. I was confident enough to refer to that person as 'she' - because I had no doubt that despite the scads of foreign and local money against her campaign, you can almost always trust the ordinary Jamaican people to do the right thing, or, as her adversaries might say, the 'Left' thing.

Fortunately for us, Portia is neither right nor left, not an ideologue, except in the more barren wastelands of American journalism. But, realistically, anyone who champions the cause of the poor must be 'Left' in one way or another.

It isn't all over, even if the fat ladies of the PNP have sung. It hasn't even started in real terms. Winning the leadership of the PNP was the easiest thing Mrs Simpson Miller will have to do for a very long time. Facing her are all kinds of expectations, not least from the most well-off in the society, who think the gravy train has got to keep running on their tracks. Realism should tell them different.

The major problems facing Portia are problems neglected by every government of Jamaica since 1980, including Michael Manley's third term. Our governments have chosen to fight irrelevant wars, on battlegrounds chosen by their opponents and with everything stacked against them. We have bought into deregulation, privatisation, liberalisation, globalisation and the continuing devaluation of the Jamaican people - and their currency.

As the financiers, loansharks and usurers would say, we are 'not competitive' and we won't be competitive until the free market has reduced us to the condition and status of Haiti and the Central African Republic.

Portia has said she wants to "make Jamaica work", and I understand from this not only that she wants to get people back to gainful employment, but that she wants Jamaica to begin to function again as a civilised, safe and peaceful community of productive and happy people.

To do this she has proposed that she will work to get the people to plan and design their future themselves, to get them to be wholly involved in the making of the significant decisions which order their lives. She says she wants to end patronage politics, the Lady Bountiful politics in which members of a distant middle-class are intermediaries between the people and the power.

What she appears to be suggesting is that the people should name their own deputies - worker delegates or shop stewards as it were - and that local government should be where the action is. We are, of course, speaking of popular empowerment - a prospect which terrifies the haut bourgeoisie in its less rational moments.

Yet, the paradox is that for all of us, and for the wealthy elite most of all, Jamaica cannot continue business as usual without an almighty explosion. Jamaica cannot continue the bleeding of its resources into foreign bank accounts. Carl Stone projected a bloody explosion if Michael Manley's PNP had not won the 1972 election. I wonder what he would say now, after 17 years of 1960s laissez faire capitalism?

Children First

So Portia will need volunteers from every class if she is going to be able to listen to the ordinary Jamaican people and help them organise themselves out of penury, misery, disease dependency and crime. I believe she will need to set up a special secretariat to organise the sampling of Jamaican public opinion, to harvest the wisdom of the people. And I also believe that if she calls on Jamaicans to help she will get an enthusiastic response from all classes.

It is my belief that the first thing that people will say is that they want safer, cleaner, more harmonious communities because without them, we cannot protect our children and nurture them so that they can fulfil their best selves - the most basic prerequisite of a civilised society.

We - the Jamaican community in Jamaica and abroad - have long understood that we must put children first. That is the reason so many of our brightest, most vigorous young people go abroad in search of a better life - for their children, even more than themselves. What we need are the facilities to do this.

We need nutrition programmes, so that mothers can be able to breastfeed their babies for at least six months, giving them a headstart on life. The World Bank on Friday, published a report on health, nutrition and population which says it is now provable that nations can add between two and three per cent to GDP simply by improving the nitrition of the poorest.

"Children are irreversibly damaged by malnutrition by age two, long before they begin primary school. Programmes begun after two can never reverse the stunting, physical and mental, that occurs in the first two years of childhood.

If mothers are going to be helped to nurture their children they will clearly need better organised, safer and healthier communities with more convenient schools and sports facilities. Much of this work can be accomplished by the people themselves, although programmes of this sort (like the "Crash Programme of the 70s) are regarded by some boobies as giveaways and handouts. If we expect people to work for nothing we should realise that they know that getting a firearm is easier and more cost-effective.

Which brings us to crime. Healthier communities means that we've got to stop burning garbage as well as to stop turning young people into garbage. I keep saying that there are Einsteins and Colin Powells cutting cane in Jamaican fields. There are Mozarts and Muhammad Alis on Death Row, as the Barnett Report on Jamaican prisons suggested 30 years ago.

Housing & Environment

For 30 years we have 'solved' our housing problem by putting people on cheap, barren and unstable land in overcrowded communities without humane facilities. There are churches, but no bars, swimming pools, playing fields and schools.

Global warming and the collateral natural hazards it brings is going to cost us millions in evacuating people ahead of hurricanes, and in rebuilding houses made uninhabitable by earthquake and flood.

Most communities know very well why people haven't built houses on seemingly attractive property; but Jamaica's mania for property development and capital gains keeps driving more and more people into 'affordable housing' in areas which are totally unsuitable for houses, like Kennedy Grove and similar government housing schemes.

We need to strengthen our environmental management and remove control from the hands of ministers and their toadies. NEPA, it seems, will approve anything in the name of "Development", destroying valuable natural habitats, wetlands, reefs and beaches - all of which are, even in the medium-term, much more valuable intrinsically than as sites for housing. We need to have binding Environmental Impact Assessment procedures so that the government can no longer build a dam across Jamaica and call it a Milennium Highway.

We need to stop the government from stealing public beaches and to make the Universal Destruction Corporation accountable to the people who must pay for its egregious mistakes. We need to ratify the SPAW Protocol of the Cartagena Convention, which would give us the muscle to protect the immeasurably precious Jamaican natural heritage against the depredations of the ignorant and the greedy.

Energy

Jamaica is a country which created fabulous wealth for Englishmen over three centuries, mostly by using windpower to grind sugar cane. The wind patterns have not changed and we might do much better to put windfarms where we now site housing developments.

In a few years it will become much too expensive for most people to own their own transport; the cost of fossil fuels will be too high. If we are to transport people across this remarkably rugged land we need more efficient public transport, and much more of it.

Wind generated electricity can drive trains as well as cable cars, an option which proved enormously profitable to Reynolds Jamaica Mines until its foreign extravagances shut it down.

Trade

Jamaica has been whoring after all kinds of fantastic developmental panaceas peddled by the United States and other wealthy countries. CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Area) is almost moribund, because the people it was originally touted to help, in Central America, have recognised it for the snare and delusion it is.

If we want to destroy the pathetic remains of our farming, we should pursue this option as we have done so assiduously and also the even more monstrous Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTTA). All that these two will bring us is more plastic garbage defacing the landscape and choking the fish. And more slave labour in "Free Zones".

We have manoeuvred ourselves into a most dangerous situation, where our food supply depends on American 'asphalt farmers' who fly their own private aircraft to inspect their property. Yet it doesn't surprise anyone that poor people and many not so poor, are seriously malnourished because they cannot afford wholesome food, subsisting on American rejects in our supermarkets and junk food and drink exported by Diabetes Inc.

Meanwhile, we have attending Jamaica, a number of tourists almost equal to our native population. It would seem reasonable that this should be our 'export market' of choice, which we should be able to supply if we were properly organised. No expensive transatlantic transportation costs.

We would save ourselves billions in foreign exchange and reduce the expensive working capital requirements of the tourist industry and of our local food merchants as well. And we would eat food that is immeasurably healthier for us, our children and our economy.

We need to start building communities around the production of food, self-supporting, caring, co-operative communities where all children would go to school, the boys would stay in school and not drop out illiterate. We need to create parks and playing fields, where the old would keep an eye on the young, where people would get to exercise their muscles and brains rather than their seduction techniques. We might have fewer unwanted children and a lot less crime.

The World Bank has estimated that reducing crime to manageable proportions could save us an amount equivalent to six per cent of our GDP. If we looked at criminals as people who have made the wrong choices or been forced into them we might save a great many lives.

As an advertisement from the '50s used to say: The life you save may be your own - if you live with consideration for your neighbours and your brothers. Jamaica's GDP hasn't increased by six per cent in one year for nearly 40 years. Add three per cent from better nourished kids- the mind boggles.

Which brings me back to Haiti. Haiti's situation is remarkably like Jamaica's, only worse. I am sure that in Haiti, as in Jamaica, there are old (probably West African) traditions like Day fe' Day, where the whole community pitched in to plough each other's fields, getting the job done faster and better.

If we were to examine some of these traditions, developed by human beings over thousands of years, because they worked, we may really be able to get not just Jamaica but Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean to work again.

We are encouraged to believe that our problems are singular and owe their genesis to some peculiar malformation of the national psyche. We need to understand that our problems resemble the problems of the disinherited of the entire planet and that until all of us are free, none of us is free.

Our next most imperative is to take up our duty of internationalist solidarity, as Cuba, even poorer than us, has demonstrated. By developing their people instead of painting buildings and building highways, the Cubans are raising the levels of living and civilisation not just for themselves, but for millions of people around the world, training doctors in Haiti, teaching illiterates in Venezuela, curing endemic disease in Africa, giving back Jamaicans their eyesight.

We can help Jamaica to work again and in doing so, help the whole world to work better. We don't need cash so much as the inspiration and the will. Which is why I believe Portia Simpson Miller, if she gets a fair chance, may transform our civilisation.

She has what it takes.