BY GARFIELD MYERS Editor at Large, South/Central Bureau myersg@jamaicaobserver.com
MANDEVILLE, Manchester — Political scientist Professor Brian Meeks is recommending a coalition government for Jamaica in the face of what he says is the real danger of the collapse of the nation state.“Ideally, what is required in Jamaica now is a coalition,” Meeks told his audience at a People’s National P arty (PNP) 75th anniversary symposium at the Golf View Hotel in Mandeville late Sunday.“Ideally what is required in Jamaica now is the best people from whatever place to come together for a period of time to sort things out,” said Meeks, political scientist from the University of the West Indies Department of Government and director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies.Meeks said he was not suggesting a dissolution of political parties or an abandonment of party loyalties. However, he argued that Jamaica’s two major political parties — the PNP and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) — needed to come to an agreement in the interest of a country overburdened by debt, poverty, disorder, and uncertainty.During the symposium and with journalists following the event, Meeks said that even in the absence of a formal coalition, there would have to be consensus between the political parties on major issues. He identified fiscal policy, education, health, crime, and industrial policy among the areas that should be treated on a basis of long- term consensus outside of political party cut-and-thrust. “What I am saying is that ,all things being equal, in the face of a national crisis, a government of national unity is what is required now,” Meeks told journalists. “(However) in the particular context of Jamaica and the sharpness of the political divisions, what you may have to have is a consultation around areas of national policy which are urgent and which require common policies around them. So that is a second best option but one that has to be considered even as we consider what are the terms of reference of a government of national unity,” he added.He argued that a “sense” among Jamaicans that the “functionary” nation state was somehow “permanent” was illusory. History had many instances of the nation state failing and disintegrating and there was no reason the same could not occur in the case of Jamaica in the absence of firm, proactive action.“Jamaica is not going to become a part of the USA. Our alternative is not becoming a part of USA, but becoming a failed state,” Meeks said bluntly. “It happens gradually like a frog in hot water until you don’t realise it …instead of the frog swimming around, it is dead in the water,” Meeks said.Reiterating his long-held position that an unwritten “compact” for governance between the political parties and citizenry disintegrated in the 1960s and 70s, leaving the country like “a ship without steerage”, Meeks said a new pact was now needed.The extent of the dangers facing Jamaican sovereignty and the nation state was demonstrated in the management of the Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke extradition affair as well as the torturous, one-year negotiations to finalise a borrowing agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), he said.Meeks argued that the “problem of failure of the national economy to grow effectively is not so much a question of policy as it is a question of politics. My basic position is that unless the two parties can find the wherewithal to set common policies around critical areas of our social and economic life that have a… life, of say, 50 years, then we are in serious trouble. It cannot be that every five years, nay every two and a half years, we abandon long-term policy for the exigency of trying to win another election”.Leadership, he contended, was the element that could make the difference and bring Jamaica back from the brink.An example of such leadership could be found in the evolution of a viable electoral machinery even in the face of the extreme tribal politics of decades ago; and externally in the will shown by Barbados in the early 1990s when faced with an IMF-imposed economic structural adjustment programme.In the case of Jamaica, Meeks said “leadership was able to say, despite the fact that we were killing each other in the streets, ‘this can’t continue, we must find a way forward’. We have to look back at people like Michael Manley, Hugh Shearer and others who came together at that point in time, and had the foresight to do it. It was a question of leadership… finding a way to move beyond the partisan divide for the country’s interest and the result is an election system which is still flawed but far less flawed than it was 30, 40 years ago.”Meeks reiterated the need “50 years after Independence” for a consultation with the Jamaican people on the “way forward”. He pointed out that the Jamaican constitution was largely written by national hero Norman Manley and accepted by the Jamaican people “on trust”. It was time, he said, for Jamaicans to have a real say in how they are governed — a task which he suggested need not be as difficult as it was 50 years ago, given modern communication technologies.HOUSE RULES
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Prof Meeks bats for coalition government
