He is that relative that you wished you never had. He turns up at the most inopportune times, wearing awful-looking shirts, reminiscent of certain politicians, and speaks with a loose tongue, publicly revealing details about your life that you would have preferred to forget.
Like a sex tape that the nasty public seeks to milk as it flows like spilt liquid, he touches everybody, destroying all that he reaches. Everything that he hits he swallows and he has a voracious appetite. Although he consumes a large part of the national income, nobody seems to be able to control or collect from him, because his name is crime and he does not pay.
call a spade a spade
It is not known what truly went on in the Vale Royal talks but it is hoped that, at a minimum, the politicians, especially those who have been in public life for more than a quarter century, will have the 'guts and nuts' to call a spade a spade and understand where the crime epidemic was born and bred. At best, what I have heard from both the ruling Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the Opposition People's National Party (PNP) is a set of half-truths and blame skipping, as if they were playing a game of 'dandy shandy' or 'stuck in the mud'.
The PNP's big man moves with the dexterity of a ballet dancer as he points to the growth of the international drug trade and, of course, his favourite scapegoat - deportees. Despite the overwhelming evidence that most of the homicides and major crimes are by boys who have seen only the planes used by carpenters, this has continued to be a beating stick. Face it! The jump in murders coincides with his tenure. So, in the same way that Dr Cassava can point to international food prices and the bulb detective segues to the price of petroleum, he says 'farrin!'
no supporting data
That is a half or quarter truth. Indeed, some of the crimes are caused by deportees, but the majority of deportations are for relatively minor and immigration offences and not capital crimes. Moreover, the allegation of their major involvement in the crime wave is not supported by the police data.
What is abundantly clear is that the politicians over the last 30 years have "abundant the yout' dem", as my illiterate friend often says. This abandonment is manifested in a youth unemployment rate that is four times the national average. Add to that the loss of more than 35,000 jobs in manufacturing and 20,000 more in agriculture and even the sightless can see the implications.
Furthermore, between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s, the number of non-unionised persons who reported unfair dismissals to the Ministry of Labour increased tenfold, from some 200 in 1990 to 2,000-plus since 2002. Typically, these persons are employed just around the minimum-wage level and are part of the most vulnerable population groups that produce the killers. Understand this! When a poor family loses a wage earner, the person who is likely to feel the most pressure is the eldest son. This 17-year-old is less likely to get other family or external support unless it is from an adult man who wants his pound of flesh.
Pressured by a girlfriend, who is socialised into being 'minded' and 'blinging out', perhaps with a babymother and a hungry child, he crosses, instead of staying on the borderline. Unable to go to college, his hope dwindles, and if he gains employment it is the same fragile type from which his mother or father was dismissed.
As reported by the Planning Institute of Jamaica, 70 per cent of the poor are 'employed'. Among these are the security guards who live on starvation wages and cannot afford to get sick or pregnant, because their employers, friends of both political parties, say that they are contractors.
They are not! But the 2002 amendment of Section 2 of the Labour Relations and Industrial Disputes Act was not properly scrutinised by the major unions affiliated to both the PNP and JLP. Despite my warnings in the late 1990s and early 2000s, nobody paid attention when I said then, as I am saying now, that the increase in homicides is directly correlated to the insensitivity to non-unionised labour in the 1990s.
other blame factors
Nonetheless, there is also an external cause. Doubtless, the drug trade, the wanton importation of deportees (and I mean the cars here, Jake!), cellphones, the Internet and cable television, bear the blame as well. Also, the loss of agricultural and manufacturing jobs is directly linked to the actions of the American Democratic Party. Ironically, the so-called 'anti-black' Reagan/Bush/Bush-led Republican Party had created the Caribbean Basin Initiative, giving preferential treatment to West Indian imports and creating thousands of jobs in manufacturing.
Paradoxically, the decline in the agricultural sector is correlated to the Bill Clinton initiative that killed the Caribbean banana industry. If you destroy the banana farmer, won't he grow weed or buy guns?
guns for garrisons
Finally, let's not be hypocritical. The senior politicians know when the 'gunoholics' were created. Long before the international drug trade became so lucrative we were giving guns to Labourites and Comrades and consolidating garrisons in the 1970s and 1980s. No politician presiding over these types of constituencies can honestly plead ignorance. Whether 'the mother of all garrisons' or a little stepchild, it is their relative.
Have any of the guns from that period been recalled? I know that the police have retrieved a token few, but not enough. In any event, the appetite was never curbed and never will be until we have a serious youth policy.
Let's change course and not stop at all.
Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work at the University of the West Indies, Mona. Send feedback to orville.taylor@uwimona.edu.jm or columns@gleanerjm.com.
