Self-serving Pols Holding Country Back…

On Thursday, April 4^th, vot­ers in East Portland will get their chance to cast votes for either the JLP’s Ann-Marie Vaz, or the PNP’s Damion Crawford for the seat made vacant after the PNP MP Lynvale Bloomfield was mur­dered in February.
The intense buzz sur­round­ing the by-elec­tion for this seat, brings into sharp focus the val­ue the two major polit­i­cal par­ties place on state pow­er.
Still evi­dent is the old style par­ti­san snip­ing, which gen­er­al­ly ends up in blood­shed.
Thus far, there has been blood­shed and the old par­ti­san Horace Chang in his dual role as General Secretary for his par­ty and Minister of National Security, has imme­di­ate­ly hyped the shoot­ings as polit­i­cal, over the find­ings of his own police Department which point­ed­ly said the shoot­ings were not political.

Now grant­ed that I could­n’t care a Rat’s ass who wins this fias­co on Thursday, it seems to me that Chang has a duty, and indeed a respon­si­bil­i­ty, not just to square his pro­nounce­ments with the find­ings of his police depart­ment, but to be mea­sured in the way he deals with inci­dents such as the shoot­ings in the con­stituen­cy con­sid­er­ing that he is the Minister of National Security.(gag)
But this is the kind of hyper-par­ti­san­ship on which Horace Chang cut his teeth and has flour­ished in, to become the mem­ber of Parliament for one of the Island’s grit­ti­est polit­i­cal gar­risons.
Chang must under­stand that his state­ments as General Secretary of his par­ty can­not be sep­a­rat­ed from Horace Chang the Minister of National Security.
If there is infor­ma­tion which is of help to the police as to who the shoot­ers were and what their motives were, Horace Chang as Garrison MP, and Minister of National Security is best poised to have those answers.
That intel­li­gence should be passed on to the police and not used to stir the pot of polit­i­cal vio­lence.
On the oth­er hand, it is remark­able that Fitz Jackson the oppo­si­tion spokesper­son on National Security can gar­ner infor­ma­tion with such alacrity indi­cat­ing that the deceased was a JLP sup­port­er want­ed by the law, yet he and his par­ty are unable and unwill­ing to sup­port mea­sures which are aimed at curb­ing the law­less­ness and the metasta­ciz­ing gang­land stple killings on the Island.

Most Jamaicans at home and abroad wish­es that polit­i­cal vio­lence is a thing of the past. Rightly so, most of the build­ing blocks of polit­i­cal vio­lence are gone.
Because of bet­ter account­abil­i­ty safe­guards in place, a‑la the Contractor General’s Act. etc, Members of Parliament have few­er dol­lars to toss around to thugs to do their bid­ding.
As a con­se­quence, politi­cians are only use­ful to the thugs as buffers between them­selves and the police.
Thugs are mak­ing their own way, through lot­to-scam­ming, mur­der for hire, Robberies, and oth­er crim­i­nal acts, which ren­ders the politi­cians far less impor­tant.
Being that as it may, politi­cians on both sides of the polit­i­cal divide are still cling­ing to their con­nec­tions in the gar­risons to deliv­er the votes en-block, as Mister Anderson clung to his mur­der­ous shot­ta Wayne, in the fic­tion­al Jamaican flick (SHOTTAS).
For the good and sur­vival of the Jamaican state, it may be a pos­i­tive out­come if life imi­tates art, since Jamaican Politicians refus­es to eschew this type of crim­i­nal asso­ci­a­tion.
If they refuse to change, then change should remove them from the equation.

One of the eas­i­est ways for the polit­i­cal gangs which run our coun­try to show matu­ri­ty is to begin to bring peo­ple togeth­er, rather than sep­a­rate them.
We are a small coun­try of fam­i­lies, friends, and neigh­bors, and yes, friends we are yet to meet.
What a dif­fer­ence it would make if the two gangs do away with the par­ty col­ors and show the world that we are one people?