A Jamaican In Exile

  https://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/news/20230722/st-elizabeth-female-farmer-gets-donkey-promised-pm No matter how the wearers of the green sunglasses do not like it, we have got to move away from politicians being involved in the giving out of donkeys, farm worker tickets, houses and the like....These are things that should be entrusted to the government/civil service bureaucracy to deal with in a fair and unbiased manner. Why? Because public money is not supposed to be the personal slush fund for politicians to use to buy votes. In a properly run country, everyone gets equal treatment according to need. These things are being provided by public money contributed by all of the tax paying public. The use of public money to provide goods and services to people needs to be properly monitored and accounted for. When this process is short-circuited by the intervention of politicians, it opens up the process to abuse: partisan bias, nepotism, corruption and the like. Time to change th...

  You can also see my video on this topic here:  https://youtu.be/sZm5eCjwym0 As the above Gleaner graphic shows, Jamaicans believe that their politicians are the most corrupt group in Jamaica. Second to that is the police. Yet, nothing has been done about it. There has been no widescale social upheaval. In this piece, I will deal with how this situation has come about and what we can do about it. There are three areas of state power: 1.     1.   Political power - those who control the government. 2.      2.  Economic power – those who control the land, the banks and businesses. 3.      3.  Social Power – those who control the mainstream media and religion. Recently, Barbados removed the British monarch as their symbolic head of state and replaced the title of monarch with a symbolic Barbadian President. This woke up the Jamaican political leaders who had grappled with this issue before but were unable to co...

https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/an-insult-to-other-civil-servants/ Odd as it may sound to the many representatives of the people elsewhere, Sweden does not offer luxury or privileges to its politicians. Without official cars or private drivers, Swedish ministers and MPs travel in crowded buses and trains, just like the citizens they represent. Without any right to parliamentary immunity, they can be tried in a court of law like any other person. With no private secretaries at the door, their bare-bones parliamentary offices are as small as 8m2. “I’m the one who pays the politicians,” says Joakim Holm, a Swedish citizen. “And I see no reason to give them a life of luxury.” Politicians who dare to spend public money on taxi journeys, instead of riding the train, end up on news headlines. Even the speaker of Parliament receives a card to use the public transportation. Only the prime minister has the right to use a car from the security forces on a permanent basis. Swedish parliame...

 https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/opinion/on-reforming-the-jcf_232827?profile=1096 I refer to the column by Malik Smith 'Reforming the JCF' of 4th October 2021. As someone who was once a teen aged recruit in the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) and who worked with the JCF as a civilian, I can vouch for the writer's claims. Inefficiency, corruption and brutality are rampant and normalized in the culture of the JCF. Like my time in the JCF, new recruits still report being treated terribly so the JCF remains a toxic workplace. New recruits also report to me that injustice is rampant in the JCF when the JCF itself is supposed to be an integral part of our justice system. The JCF recruits from a society where corruption and brutality are also normalized so the dilemma is how do you clean the lake when the river feeding the lake is itself polluted? The training facilities are good and other islands send their police to Jamaica for training. In my batch at training school, we had o...

  Rank 74 /198 Score 43 /100 Places change -4 Jamaica's score over time This data is between 2012-2019. Data between 1995-2011 is excluded because our methodology was different. CPI score Show confidence interval* 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 0 20 40 60 80 100 *The confidence interval reflects the variance in the value of the source data that comprise the CPI score.