Dear Editor,

I have voted only once in my life. I was an eager 21-year-old in 1993 and the election was held on my birthday in March, it felt…fated. It has been almost 30 years since I visited a polling station and I must say I don’t feel as if I am any closer to, again, participating in that manner.

Corruption was and continues to be one of my greatest political deterrents; however, there seems to now be an unfortunate trend in the fight to improve probity and integrity in our already sub-par government systems. It would seem that corruption, the perception of corruption, and the reporting of corruption is being used as a political tool to launch political witch-hunts or to boost newspaper sales.

In recent times, the threshold for what is regarded as a scandal has been obliterated and newspapers now exploit our collective appetite for controversy by splashing dollar figures on headlines beside notable names which are bound to grab attention.

It feels like a witch-hunt against this Government, generally, and Minister Robert Montague is the latest target or the man sent out to catch the bullets.

The other possibility is that it’s a grand ruse to make everything a scandal so that, eventually, nothing is. Either way, this distracts us from discussing and ventilating real issues and instances of real corruption.

The most recent nine-day noise has fallen — yet again — at the feet of Minister Montague, with the report of the appointment of the CEO of the Toll Authority of Jamaica, which was splattered on the front page of The Gleaner.

To date, I am unaware of the real accusation in that story as the gentlemen was more than qualified for the job. But, of late, it seems that any headline with the words scandal, corruption, and Montague will inevitably have behind it non-issues and noise, propped up by poor journalism.

The faceless and powerful, it would seem, are exploiting and morphing our appetite for a clean Government into an appetite for corruption. But, to what end? Possibly to further more corruption or to see to the failure of the Government.

It is truly a desperate situation as we are obviously being used as pawns in a game we know nothing about and in the end we all lose.

Kemoy Lindsay

shaqattack_cbar@hotmail.com