THE late attorney and PNP government minister David Coore, QC said: “The people cannot be sovereign, it is Parliament that is sovereign.” Coore was also against the people having inalienable and justiciable rights. These are the legacies of the celebrated founders of the Jamaican Constitution.

In a democracy, supreme power lies in free citizens being able to elect a government to represent them. Sovereignty refers to government free from external control, exercising self-determination and self-rule. Citizens are free by virtue of God-given mutual rights, which cannot be separated from them without empowering them with an action. Any reduction of this freedom or sovereignty is inimical to democracy. Thus, in its very design, the Jamaican Constitution is undemocratic. Coore made legally extant both the essence of the British system and the racist sentiment of Britain towards people it dominated from slavery though colonialism. The Jamaican citizenry was thus never brought to the centre of our society. The local elites clutched the opportunity that Independence brought for them to replace colonial British masters, and the black masses understand Independence as changing of gatekeepers.

The idea of a new and equal Jamaican citizenry for each Jamaican would have meant an unbearable embrace between Anglo-Saxony and blackness. Here is the modern undemocratic structuring of the Jamaican State; we are consciously aware that “di worl nuh level”.

From slavery through Independence, parliament has been the reserve of gentry folk with nepotistic connection to Britain. This is the appeal in adopting from them a non-egalitarian and elitist system of governance that the British never bothered to document. A feat made possible because law has an existence as manners and customs and, unbroken as British tradition is, their constitution is so reposited.

Jamaica, being geographically, historically and socio-culturally displaced from Britain, could never then have the pretext for adopting their constitution. There is no surprise then in the departures between the two and, worse yet, the failure to deliver the desired societal outcomes. The fundamental compact between the Jamaican state and its people remain as alien today as in its inception. The translation from Westminster to Gordon House being riddled with errors of transmission are therefore undemocratic in their effect. The governments have thus been the poorer for not being the conscious power of unconscious customs of Jamaicans.

Contemporary Jamaican political practice

The Sunday Gleaner’s article of May 3, 2015 by Frank Phipps, QC, demonstrated the undemocratic structure of parliament. A Senate of 21 appointed people have authority and power over 63 elected representatives. The national energy dissipated on the membership of Opposition Senators Christopher Tufton and Arthur Williams to the Senate confirms that the upper house is no mere ceremonial formality.

PNP political capital to adopt the Caribbean Court of Justice as our final appellate court, an investment requiring confidence that a JLP senator will vote with them, brings into sharp focus the undemocratic purpose of the Senate. Within both parties, a governance structure such as the Senate would have been anathema.

Conference is the highest governing authority in the parties, and here a delegate’s vote is fundamental. How then can nominated senators have veto powers over elected member of parliaments? A parallel over-reach was the attempt by JLP MPs to replace the party leader by usurping the delegate vote. Does a small group of senators and the persons selecting them comprise a better judgement than the two million Jamaican electors?

The notion of a superior upper house originated from the British system of monarchical inherited autocracy. In these realms, influence was peddled in a social courts of fantastical notions of class and nobility. Here, personal relations with the monarch determined ones position and status.

The courtiers formed the selection pool for the House of Lords or Senate which helped the monarch with their public biddings. Parliament was pejoratively called the House of Commons because it was elected from mere ordinary people — a token of inclusion alongside the arbitrary and absolute dictates of the royal court. From a primitive, tribalistic and warmongering existence, the British settled into feudalism around the eighth century. A constitutional monarchy eventually emerged out of long periods of despotism, which recurred intermittently. The British were never predisposed to the ideas of democracy as invented by the Greeks or which fuelled the French revolution. These undemocratic tendencies are behind modern British political challenges such as the EU, Scotland and Ireland. The British Constitution is, therefore, a custom of power relations which modernises itself by granting minimum concessions to its dominions only as it becomes politic to do so.

This politic was evident with the abolition of slavery, universal adult suffrage, and independence after World War II. The exchequer was taking into account the cost of war and had no fat to maintain unprofitable colonies. There are still colonies in the Caribbean that are demanding independence which is not forthcoming — they are still valuable assets. So, while independence is to be embraced, our history must dispel with the rhetoric claiming that it was fought for. Independence fought for would not permit a Britain-lite constitution, as designed by Coore, abrogating all notions of sovereignty of the Jamaican people in a manner consistent with foreign British values.

And now the PNP wishes to press on with its agenda for Anglophone Caribbean political integration. A unifying regional appellate court, the CCJ is but the first step. Human history, especially on matters of the State, makes it clear that one must do the right thing for the right reason. The right thing is to have a local appellate court because, for its self-respecting people, Jamaica must have its own ways and means towards the objects of State — Woe to the day it is unwelcome at the Privy Council. The wrong reason is to have an ulterior motive for the court, which simultaneously defines an inherent risk to the court’s integrity.

Patriotism has nothing to do with critical assessment, except that it may be effected with greater fidelity where assessments are more honest. Such appeal to a patriotism requiring the citizen to deny his conscience and knowledge of truth is pompous if not obviously undemocratic.

A word on jurisprudence

Jurisprudence posits with axiomatic assertions whose foundations lie outside of themselves. Without an internal logic it is not authentically unified and becomes an inexact science. A lack of a fundamental rule or principle belies appearances of objectivity, hence inequalities are always exhibited in jurisprudence. The body of knowledge, though grounded with rationale, is therefore subject to chance. In which case, logic may be overridden by reasons or explanation. The jurists, thus, need to have certain points precisely and definitively settled aside (like a convention or an understanding; lacking strict logical conclusions consistent with the pure notion of the matters on hand). The truth and the right become nebulous and a point may be determined without definitive certainty.

Jurisprudence is further oblivious to its fullest implications and their material effect with profound certitude in its conclusion. This problem is due to the limited nature of its logical forms, whereas its contingencies are simply unsound logic. Jurisprudent conclusions also rest on inadequate grounds given a reliance on detached and casual inference, feelings, faith, authority, and perception. These characteristics of juris-prudence grounds it in subjectivity and partiality. They have absolutely nothing to do with the eminence of jurists. Every diligence is therefore required to imbue independence — from the grubby hands of politics — in the implementation of jurisprudence. No doubt, this point is not lost on Edward Seaga in his view that the Appeals Court ruling that the leader of the Opposition’s termination of two opposition senators’ appointments was unconstitutional should be taken to the Privy Council.

Missed opportunity

Seaga, the last remaining member of the founding constitutional team, was not radical because he failed to be socially innovative. He should have created new methods for alliance and inclusion, and situate the Jamaican citizen with primacy in the constitution. This would have been bold and transcending evolutionary or transformational change.

As revolutionary innovator, Seaga would have been necessarily disruptive and new. Instead, he went along with the conventional view of who is a Jamaican. In not affording Jamaica the new and authentic identity for its citizenry, in a new country and new state, we were guaranteed the certain outcome which has been our experience since Independence.

The constitution amendment efforts by the JLP include Seaga’s Bill of Rights and Bruce Golding’s 2007 legislative agenda. They never happened during Seaga’s great majorities in Parliament and have gone unnoticed by the Jamaican citizenry since the 2010 amendments. Paradoxically, constitutional reform connotes an inconvenient afterthought or distraction from the normal business of government. Leadership continues to be oblivious of an emergent Jamaican project.

Regionally maximising, but not optimising

Caricom abounds with evidence of the undemocratic tendency. These include a Trinidadian Prime Minister’s persecution of the chief justice in 2005; the recent expulsion of the Opposition from parliament by the Trinidadian Prime Minister; an evolving trend to refute the democratic will after a ballot — we saw signs in Jamaica in 2007, Guyana, St Kitts and Nevis this year; the 1976 Jamaican state of emergency; extremism in Grenada and Guyana, and the expensive, political charades of commissions of enquiries.

In 2014, Trinidad’s UNC-led coalition used a simple majority to make Caribbean groundbreaking constitutional change. These included term limits, fixed election dates, run-offs to ensure that a winner gets more than 50 per cent of the votes, and recall of parliamentarians where they are found lacking. This proves that there are many things that can be done to improve the constitutions in the region without the complexities that are perennially provided as excuse. These changes were to be followed by even more sweeping changes in a new parliament. The entire project was scrapped when polling showed that the run-off voting would give opposition parties an advantage. So partisanship trumps democracy.

There is no need to vilify the JLP if they do not wish to support the CCJ at this time; that is their democratic right. Is the PNP willing to take the country through a quagmire, whereby its partisan agenda to institute the CCJ is repealed via the same means by which it was enacted? It is undemocratic, unpatriotic and unethical for a senator to go against his conscience and party in pursuit of his own reputation. PNP suitors of such a senator are appealing to any feeling of vindictiveness he could have against his party. This raw political strategising could have been discerned even from the interventions of the parliament. It is a strategising that is resonant with PNP paranoia and superstition that any referendum is pre-ordained with JLP victory. The PNP leadership says the Jamaican electorate would not make the “right decision” in a referendum on the CCJ. They will therefore secure this objective without the risk of a disagreeing population. In their belief that any campaign associated with a CCJ referendum would promote disingenuous distractions, the PNP is betraying their lack of confidence in an electorate that has voted more often than not for them. It also exposes the limits of PNP prowess in electioneering, com-munications and ideas. The PNP’s love for the poor, small man and ordinary Jamaicans does not include respect for their intellect nor right to self-determine. The select wise men of the PNP, in the tradition of David Coore, know better than “di likkle peeple dem, wha good fi dem” and how “fi get roun dem”.

Instead of the nation state that our political parties continue to fail to invent, the PNP and JLP have conjured up much ingenuity in political craft. Garrison politics, with all its other unsavoury social attendants, is a much-celebrated conventional wisdom: The ends justify the means. An end to capture the power of the State on behalf of the political party surmounting all else. The regressive denial that “garrisons in both parties and other electoral malpractices do not change the intention of the people so election outcomes accurately reflect their will” is incredulous in the light of the energy and resources dissipated in constructing and maintaining them. Garrisons are communities coerced into a political monoliths, driving out any notion of pluralism. Such constituencies typically have voter turnouts greater than the list of total registered voters and/or winners with excessive majorities. They account for more than a third of all parliamentary seats throughout the island. Similar garrisons are the new norms in other Caricom states.

Why does all this matter?

The undemocratic tendencies have robbed the country from having a sovereign people. As such, the country has no government. Observe the quality of the civil service, public policy, and wastage of resources though graft, inefficiency and ineffectiveness. What the country has are tribalistic parties to whom their leadership pledge greater loyalty than to Jamaica. The parties engage in a perpetually destabilising campaign to capture State power for use on behalf of themselves.

This subversion of State power is the real meaning of developing state. It is a process which works hand in glove with transnational organised crime to maintain both in destructive symbiosis. Its primary goal is the dominant state, where government accounts for over 30 per cent of GDP; giving meaning to the phrase power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. So the socio-economic under-development of the society should not be perceived through the craft of each specialism, but rather as the fundamental effect of State dominance. There can therefore be no meaningful combination of linear solutions based on piecemeal specialism analyses.

These perennial ills are not matters that are solved within their own space or in some kind of macro-strategic plan. There is over a half-century record of trials and failures. The problems have become multiplexed in spaces that have made constructs such as nation State, rural-urban and competition, obsolete. These constructs have been the starting assumptions of national plans and programmes. The new spaces transcend culture, borders, social class and charismatic messianic leadership. Problem-solving is now driven by technology, communication and solutions leadership based on complex thinking. But the starting point is somewhat obvious. It is that the antithesis to State dominance is a regulated market economy. It is a system of incentives and disincentives which could rectify many of the negative societal and cultural dysfunctions that appear to be ingrained in the national psyche but are rarely observed amongst Jamaicans living and working overseas. The necessary condition to be met is that Jamaicans become a free people, with supreme power to elect their own government. The new Jamaican project is to create a sovereign democracy with a government constrained by its people’s will and interests.

Dwight Lewis is an energy expert who continuously innovates on a world space to provide specific leadership solutions for Caribbean complexities. He is also a lecturer in energy and markets Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business, UWI Trinidad & Tobago. Send comments to dwightclewis@gmail.com