Ian Boyne

We have a brand new government but the same old Jamaica: There are still vociferous charges of alleged brutal police executions; homicides are still escalating, carnal abuse is still high and political tribalism is still alive and well.

Prime Minister Golding, as I have been stressing, has been sounding the right notes, striking the right chords and making the right moves with his agenda of priorities. The shocking tales of alleged police brutality last week only underline the importance of his establishing the Citizens Protection Bureau and the single independent authority to investigate abuses by the security forces.

The PM's reiteration of his initiatives to deal swiftly with corruption is most welcome. His emphasis on inclusiveness and on reducing the powers of the Executive while increasing the power of the Opposition are most commendable. The issues which have tugged at his heartstrings since the 1990s when he launched his National Democratic Movement, and which he is again putting at centre stage, have infused vigour in the Political Project and can go a far way in reviving civic activism and spiking cynicism.

values and attitudes

But there is another critical step that the Prime Minster needs to take on to complete his revolutionary project. Without this step his revolution will lack a critical component for success. The Prime Minister needs to centrepiece the whole issue of values and attitudes. Call it another name, if you don't want to resurrect the ghost of the past. Whatever name is attached to it, there needs to be a focus on the serious and crippling decline in positive, upbuilding values and attitudes. The academics call it social capital, and increasingly social scientists have been showing that it is a vital component of sustainable economic development.

Indeed, the studies have shown that those countries which have suffered financial sector meltdowns and other economic crises since the 1980s have weathered these storms best when they have had high social capital ratios. Countries which are low on trust, cohesiveness, voluntarism and other civic virtues do poorly in navigating the rough seas of economic turbulence.

constructive criticism

You can't develop an economy with a confrontational, adversarial and tribalistic political culture. Responsible, constructive criticism and opposition is quite different from fractiousness and points-scoring.

In Jamaica we quarrel, fuss and disagree too easily. It is as though we are hard-wired for those negative responses. We have to start making a connection between that culture and our economic stagnation. If we believe that our stagnation is solely because the PNP has been in power for nearly 19 years, we are making a tragic mistake.

I state boldly that there are certain underlying structural and cultural problems which we have which will ensure that our economic underdevelopment remains, despite the JLP's being in power. Unless these issues are tackled, we will never see economic development, irrespective of who is in Jamaica House. This is why I am challenging the Prime Minister to mainstream the issues of values and attitudes, for this country will never be able to attract the levels of foreign investments which we are capable of if we remain as fractious, intolerant, violent and tribalistic as we are.

Investors are taking their money and their families to societies where people are peaceful, broad-minded, and tolerant of other people's lifestyles. What is driving investments are not just economic indices. The social and the cultural

have been featuring quite heavily in the recent investor profiles.

crucial maladies

We in Jamaica have to get with the programme. The Prime Minister needs to start speaking more about some of the crucial maladies holding us back, including our coarseness, our crude materialism, our unhealthy individualism and hedonism, our irresponsible family life patterns and sexual behaviour; and our indifference to traditional morality, or what some call middle-class values.

It is not an issue that the Prime Minister is incapable of articulating. In fact, I remember that he was the first of our contemporary politicians to speak out boldly about our high levels of teenaged pregnancies. Years ago he was giving speeches where he mentioned the alarming percentage of out-of-wedlock births - a politically incorrect thing to say, but absolutely critical in our context.

He has not totally abandoned the issue and, indeed, I had reason to praise him after his recent budget speech in which he highlighted some moral issues facing the nation. There was a section of his speech titled: 'Behavioural Dysfunctionalities: Urgent Need for Resocialisation'.

In his budget speech he said we must be concerned about "the vicious manifestation of this social decay facing us: the unwanted pregnancies, the rape and carnal abuse, the abuse of our women and children."

aware of right and wrong

In that speech Golding made a profound point. He noted that people of his generation were acutely aware of the difference between right and wrong. "All of us leaned on the rules when we were growing up. Some bent the rules, others broke them. But even when you broke the rules, you knew you were doing something wrong."

It was a theme he picked up when he spoke at a Peace Management Initiative seminar shortly after. He said insightfully then that what his generation deems deviant behaviour is not recognised as such by those labelled deviants. They see their behaviour as merely challenging outmoded, tradition-bound, class-driven values. In other words, Golding was saying significantly we are reading out of different philosophical grammar books.

Now that he is Prime Minister he must add this issue to his welcome menu of institutional and constitutional reforms. Without this moral and cultural reform, his other reforms will be doomed, or at least dwarfed. Fatherlessness is a major reason for our high crime rate. The JLP in government must not succumb to the naive view that the solution to our crime problem is to create more jobs and to grow the economy. That is an easily falsifiable proposition.

(I don't have to mention that the poorest countries in the world don't have the highest crime rates, and that Jamaicans have been poorer in the past with much lower crime rates to refute that hypothesis).Why do most poor people refrain from crime? It is because of their values and attitudes; because of what they have in their heads (often religious teachings) and what they cherish in their hearts. There is a connection between poverty, joblessness and crime, no doubt, but every social scientist knows that correlation and causation are not the same thing.

If we did not have as many abandoned children in Jamaica growing up without love, compassion and caring, we would not have the levels of bitterness and consequent violence. This is no minor issue to be relegated to the bottom of the national agenda after we have dealt with the economy and institutional and governance reform. We ignore this at our peril.

father-absent homes

In her GraceKennedy Foundation lecture, the respected scholar on early childhood, Dr. Maureen Samms-Vaughan, disclosed that her research has found that children from father-absent homes "manifest a number of internalising and externalising problem behaviours, including sadness and depression, aggression, sex role difficulties, early initiation of sexual activity and teen pregnancy, as well as poor social and adaptive functioning and low self-esteem."

Take the last one alone - low self-esteem. Do you know the number of maladies and anti-development features associated with low self-esteem? Do you know that our briskness to fight and murder and our low conflict resolution skills have a lot to do with low self-esteem and the inability to take the slightest 'dissing'? Everyone cries respect and only those with a healthy self-esteem can take the assaults on the ego without reacting in socially destructive ways. We have to deal with these issues.

Many carry out corrupt acts just to have certain material possessions so that they can 'be somebody'. Setting up institutional mechanisms to deal with corruption is not enough, Prime Minister. We have to deal with some of the root causes of corruption. Let's tackle the institutional as well the cultural issues.

Launch a massive, well-funded-for-the-first-time campaign to restore positive values and attitudes. The PNP government's attempts were lukewarm, poorly devised and cripplingly underfunded.

The Government should ask some of the 'Big Money' interests to put substantial funding behind such a programme and make the creative geniuses who ran the JLP campaign devise a similarly effective marketing programme to captivate the whole country. This programme needs very big bucks.

The idea of having a massive family life campaign - as one aspect of a broader resocialisation project - was poignantly defended by now Education Minister Andrew Holness in his budget speech of 2006. Get a hold of it. The highly respected young politician told the House that "It is time we do something about the ailing institution of the family. It is time we get back the fathers in the family. It is time we take a second look at teenage pregnancy." This is an inner-city MP talking so he knows what he is talking about.

poverty cause

Hear him: "When the family fails, the value system fails and it becomes difficult to achieve social cohesion and order." Holness even showed that the family plays an important part in capital accumulation and, therefore, our dysfunctional family life patterns are part of our poverty problem in Jamaica. "When 80 per cent of births are to single mothers there is something going wrong with the institution of the family. When the father is absent from the lives of at least 70 per cent of children in Jamaica then we must be prepared to do something about it."

Holness knows that he is doomed as Education Minister if something is not done about it. I agree totally with the Prime Minister when as Opposition Leader he identified "behavioural dysfunctionalities" as indicating an "urgent need for resocialisation". Mr. Prime Minister, complete your revolutionary agenda by centre-staging the issue of building our social capital. You cannot succeed without it.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com