Our men are letting down the country badly. With our women striving to rise above the degeneracy, it would be true to say Jamaican women deserve better men than those being produced by our society.

Over the summer, our women shone ever so brightly in the global sports arenas. The amazing Reggae Girlz made it to the round of 16 of the FIFA World Cup in Australia. The equally amazing Sunshine Girls came ever so close to lifting the crown in the Netball World Cup in Cape Town, South Africa. The stage then moved to Budapest, Hungary, where the World Athletics Competition was held. Our women, again, did the nation proud, not only with the number of podium finishes but with their grace and style. It is not just in sports that our women excel. They largely excel in the home, in their communities, in the classroom, and in the professions.

By contrast, the Jamaican male, generally, is a pitiful caricature of manhood. Let’s examine the extent of the crisis with the help of statistics from the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (Statin). In 2010 the population in Jamaica by gender was males, 1,332,700 (49 per cent) and females, 1,373,100 (51 per cent), almost even. Yet females did better than males by almost every key indicator: life expectancy at birth: males 69 years, females 75 years; literacy rates for persons 15 years old and over: males 81 per cent and females 91 per cent; tertiary level enrolment: males 31 per cent, females 69 per cent; victims of homicide: males 90 per cent, females 10 per cent; perpetrators of homicide (people arrested): males 98.0 per cent, females 2.0 per cent.

It’s a common sight in inner-city communities to see females, looking and smelling good, on their way to work or to attend classes passing a group of unkempt males sitting on a corner building a spliff or swirling a straw-coloured intoxicant in a plastic cup. Why would she want such a lout for anything other than stud services?

With such disparity between the sexes, the “babyfada” and “babymada” syndrome predominates. One telling statistic is that over 80 per cent of Jamaican women who have reached the age of marriage and are available for marriage will never be married. The number of children born out of wedlock is of a similar magnitude. Faced with the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in a concubinage relationship or alone, some women are leaving our shores for foreign to increase their chances of finding a deserving spouse.

There is talk these days about importing workers to fill the island’s skills gap. Maybe the plan to import workers should be extended to importing good and worthwhile males to increase the pool of eligible bachelors.

Suicide-Murder

The content of today’s column may be disturbing to the faint-hearted, to those who bury their heads in the sand concerning Jamaica’s world-topping murder rate, and to those who harbour nostalgic feelings that Jamaica is a normal society.

Friday, August 25, 2023 gunmen unleashed a reign of terror as they carried out a brazen heist at Scotiabank in the busy town of Mandeville. Footage on social media, believed to be that of the shoot-out, shows men armed with high-powered guns attacking a Beryllium security team and making off with what appears to be bags of cash. The incident is made more unnerving by the fact that it occurred about 5:00 pm on a crowded thoroughfare with many onlookers and accompanied by wild shooting, the sound of which would attract police.

What causes this level of daring in murderers who, with no concern for their own life, carry out their nefarious acts in broad daylight in proximity to police stations and zones of special operations posts, and with eyewitnesses looking on?

From inside the belly of the beast I have been observing this phenomenon and have come to an unsettling conclusion. I have, possibly for the first time, coined the term “suicide-murder” in attempting to arrive at an appropriate description of a serious turn in homicide motive.

What is suicide-murder? It is murder committed by perpetrators who don’t expect to live to see 30 years old, whose mantra is, “Mi dun dead already”. Our depressed inner-city communities are filled with walking dead; men who feel killing themselves in this way is preferable to hanging themselves from a tree or cutting their wrists.

A rough parallel is the suicide bombers we see on television in war zones. In a form of martyrdom, an individual straps a bomb to his/her body and runs into a defenceless crowd knowing his/her own death is sure.

Sigmund Freud, the man some people regard as the father of modern psychology, wrote of death instincts. Compared to life instincts, death instincts result from an unconscious wish for death. According to Freud, self-destructive behaviour is an expression of the death drive.

More effective and deadly policing will not by itself get rid of death instincts or suicidal tendencies pervading the society, especially in our young vulnerable males. A way must be found to temper this by increasing life instincts — a basic desire and need for survival and pleasure.

Dr Henley Morgan is founder and executive chairman of the Trench Town-based Social Enterprise, Agency for Inner-city Renewal and author of My Trench Town Journey — Lessons in Social Entrepreneurship and Community Transformation for Policy Makers, Development Leaders, and Practitioners. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or hmorgan@cwjamaica.com