IT is always easier to say than it is to do and in this regard my friend Doug Halsall, a successful Jamaican businessman and head of Advanced Integrated Systems, has employed a mantra of “better to say ‘well done, than well said'” in his climb up the ladder of success.

It is the epitome of all political correctness in this season when the government is seen to be constantly against the ropes to continue to punch it silly. It is seemingly forgotten that influential newspaper columnists and talk-show hosts on radio and TV have their “constituents” just as politicians have theirs too. When the herd instinct takes over and all begin to criticise Prime Minister Golding and the performance of the JLP Cabinet, if the columnist or talk-show host is not careful, he or she is likely to be just another moo, echoing the call of the herd and nothing more.

If the columnist or talk-show host is not sufficiently a free thinker and enjoys walking barefooted in the droppings of the herd, he or she could be tempted to develop a new constituency around seeing negatives in every move of the present government. Even worse, where seeming positives emerge, the usual employment of scrutiny tends to give way to deep cynicism. and even in the reporting and commentary on a specific positive, one finds it necessary to rehash old, or identify prevailing negatives to give the commentary “balance”.

Earlier this year when poor, misguided young people from a lane off Mannings Hill Road walked about 150 metres to attack people like themselves who were painting pictures of a certain DJ on a wall, the danger of the Gully-Gaza feud came to a head as knives were brought into play and people badly injured. Among young people who had no shining heroes to look up to, the Gully-Gaza conflict was simply another step which followed naturally from the political polarisation which was a living feature of inner-city, garrison-brain existence.

The recent meeting between top DJs, Vybz Kartel and Mavado, which was brokered by the Office of the Prime Minister and which resulted in Kartel and Mavado joining hands and saying to all that there is no animosity between them, has been criticised by some. One criticism has focused on “watering down” the high office of the prime minister while others have indicated, with some merit, that if the peace does not hold, the political backlash could destroy the JLP administration.

Many of us do not know that among tattoo parlours in Jamaica, “Gully” and “Gaza” have, in recent months, become the most requested of items. Many seem blissfully unaware that in some schools, even in the toilets, depending on the strength of the particular faction, there are “Gully” and “Gaza” toilets. The Gully-Gaza feud has even spread like a virus to sections of Japan, and in Trinidad and Tobago it is more than a cause for concern.

When I worked “eight to four” in the private sector in the 1970s, one of the most hated items on a worker’s job description was the last one which said, “…and any other duties which my supervisor deems important”. I had hell explaining it to those for whom I had supervisory responsibilities.

Well, the prime minister knows that in addition to the 1001 duties that he has, the last one is, “and any other duty that the people of the country deem important and pressing”.

Like all prime ministers before him, he is now in a rather long season of “damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t”. To the extent that all problems in Jamaica are interconnected and spring either from our previous omissions or deliberate commissions of evil intent, it is never a simple task to declare one problem more important than the other.

My favourite cartoonist Clovis recently took a hilarious poke at the prime minister by depicting Golding rushing off to broker a deal with the two influential DJs while the IMF agreement remains seemingly stalled. All is fair in love, war and politics, and I am certain that Bruce Golding must have had a good laugh.

Congrats must go to Daryl Vaz, information and telecommunicationss minister, who chaired the meeting and gave details of the five-point plan which is needed to sustain the effort, or at the very least, bring it back towards the tipping point which existed before the rivalry became warfare.

Congrats must go to Saleem Lazarus, team member of Golding’s West Kingston constituency committee, in garnering the support of a certain senior DJ to assist in part of the process and being one of the major facilitators leading up to the meeting at the Office of the Prime Minister. Congrats must go to the private sector interests who will be involved in the T-shirt giveaways to the communities most affected. These T-shirts will have the likeness of both DJs in a united show.

The duties of a prime minister are “prime ministerial things”. He must act even when we believe that he is merely putting out brush fires. Some of us columnists and talk-show hosts were so taken up in appealing to our own constituency and giving them the rhythm to which they have grown used to that we had forgotten that the Gully-Gaza conflict was increasingly growing out of control and it needed state intervention.

I have no problem in seeing for the prime minister a big positive in allowing the brokering of this peace deal. One of the problems in the peace deals of the late 1970s, and especially in the Seaga/Manley holding of hands, was that there was an underlying understanding that one deal was for show (holding of hands) while another, the real one, could only operate on the rules which had been established in our brand of politics. Mistrust, the reinforcement of hate and the need to win at all costs. So the M-16 entered and the country was literally on fire from 1976 to 1980.

Louis Moyston’s letter on the Gully-Gaza conflict to the Observer editor yesterday said in part, “The performers, Mavado ‘the Gully god’ and Kartel the ‘czar of the Portmore Empire’, are very much victims of those who conduct violence in their names. Before them there was and still is political tribalism. This scourge laid the foundation that evolved in a most dangerous link between violence and crime. Many of the students who participate in ‘high school tribalism’ live in areas with high levels of political tribalism.”

The society may still be split between those who have and those who have not, but the haves have seen in the last five years that the problems of the dispossessed are theirs too. Murder now has a multiple, indefinite visa to all parts of the country, uptown and downtown.

Cauterising the Gully-Gaza conflict and sustaining the peace will not be easy because of the pressing social undercurrents and the absence of real heroes for our people. But some action has been taken and for that I congratulate all involved, especially Kartel and Mavado.

observemark@gmail.com