People's National Party President Mark Golding
Material returns!
The noose of performative rhetoric is now quickly tightening around the political necks of Opposition leader and People’s National Party (PNP) President Mark Golding and his party. A reprieve is not likely.
I said here previously that 2025 Jamaica is not the Jamaica of the 1970s, 80s, or 90s — when only a few privileged people owned and/or controlled the levers of the media. I believe those days are gone for good. Thank God!
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I know that immediately some are going to scream, “Higgins, you are a proponent of transactional politics.” The truth is politics has been transactional since time immemorial. Political engagements will continue in that vein until kingdom come. It’s a fact!
I am not here countenancing the exchange of votes for money and/or the exchange of political largesse on bases which are set out in the law as corrupt and/or otherwise seen to be patently corrupt by reasonable and well-thinking people. I am quick to make these clarifications because some people, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone with a modicum of sense, frequently describe and decry transactional politics as the political equivalent of the bubonic plague. Invariably these inexpert commentators reach for their default position, which is that transactional politics is the nucleus of voter fraud and favours dispensed on corrupt bases. Again, I do not countenance bribery and/or the dispensing of political favours on corrupt bases. By transactional politics, I mean the sum total of feelings, expectations and demands, justifiably made by citizens in a State on those who come to them at intervals committing to efficiently harness, grow, and manage State resources so that the lives of, especially ordinary folks can be made materially better. Why “especially ordinary” citizens? As I previously noted here, I am a fervent subscriber of this perspective: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” These are the words of Franklin D Roosevelt, 32nd US president.
The State exists to do for its citizens, especially ordinary citizens, what they cannot effectively and efficiently individually do for themselves. This must never be confused with the State which aims to be a communist utopia, in which folks are dishonestly led to believe that manna can be made to fall from the sky. I don’t buy into the lazy man’s logic of Fabian Socialist thinking either; the type of socialism which gave birth to the PNP. In reality, it is mere tomfoolery on steroids that the State can be responsible for citizens’ every itch and scratch. The State cannot practically fulfil the needs of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.
No State can or will ever be effective in the role of a superman. If you disbelieve, see the especially catastrophic record of former Prime Minister Michael Manley between 1972 and 1980. National leaders that have tried to be all things to all men are soon discarded on the scrap heap of history. And those who are still foolishly attempting to walk on water and turn water into wine are now on political life support. Think Cuba and Venezuela.
Simultaneously, let us not fool ourselves for a moment, the fact is: Left to some, the so-called invisible hand of the market will almost always clap in one direction. That direction is always to the decided advantage of the well-to-dos.
Unlike the late Ronald Reagan, president of the United States of America, and the late prime minister of the United Kingdom Margaret Thatcher, who spearheaded neo-liberalism in the 1980s, I don’t believe that: “Government is not the solution to our problem; Government is the problem.”
Anyway, those among us who overtly or covertly espouse an unenlightened, selfish, and dishonest narrative that voters expecting and strongly demanding good asphalted roads and properly prepared pavements to walk/drive on; ease of doing business at the nation’s tax offices; modern equipment and conditions at public facilities such as schools, courthouses etc; reliable, high speed Internet and related services; low inflation; low taxes; reduction in crime and violence; improved educational outcomes in all our schools; better and more efficient means of public transportation; all-around good governance; and I could go on, are somehow negatively transactional, are living in la la land. Welcome to the future, is my wake-up call to them.
The days when political leaders won elections by merely peddling ideologies, be it socialist, communist, fascist, or capitalist, etc, especially through the conduits of performative rhetoric are over. Folks today want material returns which better their lives and their children’s lives. The peddlers of ideologies have invariably left the majority holding the bag. The majority sensibly now want heaven on Earth, not in the afterlife.
PNP in a quandary
Mark Golding, a socialist — so he told this newspaper two years ago — I believe, understands these realities but pretends that he does not. Why? That is what socialists do. They are often skilled in performative rhetoric, but are lousy when it comes to setting out fundable plans that will result in sustained benefits which register in the pockets and are visible on the dinner tables of especially ordinary people who they claim to love (prioritise).
Golding and the PNP are evidently caught in a quandary. Golding’s veritable political meltdown while addressing party supporters in Hartford, Connecticut, recently is more confirmation of my earlier declaration that: “Something is not right at 89 Old Hope Road.”
Recall in my The Agenda pieces entitled: ‘Believe them when they say…’ and ‘Tactics are not strategies’ of January 19 and 26, 2025, respectively, I pinpointed how the PNP’s coordination was just totally at sea. At the mentioned meeting in the US, Golding said: “Even things we put out don’t get covered… The media is bought out by them” – a clear reference to the governing JLP — “…and they are supported by the elite”. His assertions were not rooted in a shred of evidence. This needs to alarm all well-thinking Jamaicans.
Golding also said: “Jamaica has a corrupt Government,” but did not provide one iota of evidence to support his claim. The fact that Golding made these assertions on foreign soil should also frighten all well-thinking Jamaicans. Why? Golding is our prime minister-in-waiting.
In my The Agenda piece on February 16, 2025, entitled ‘Leadership by Ja’s CEO’, I noted a non-negotiable standard brilliantly summarised by one of Britain’s most consequential prime ministers, Harold Macmillan. He famously said: “When I am at home I am a politician, but when I am abroad I am first and foremost a Statesman.” I don’t believe Golding understands this binding obligation to Jamaica. If he did, he would not have made these very alarming statements on foreign soil.
Has Golding conceded?
It is not difficult to figure what obtains at 89 Old Hope Road. It suffers with a kind of malignant political in-coordination. Even a cursory study of the local political tea leaves will reveal that the PNP lacks leadership and coordination.
In my The Agenda piece on February 23, 2025, entitled ‘Don’t fall prey’, I noted for example that some political scholars posit that when Opposition parties fail to gain desired traction with eligible voters, especially in the run-up to a consequential election, they often resort to the last-ditch tactic of making frequent predictions about when a national election will be held and also ramp up demands for an election to be held. I noted that this was one of the surest indications that a political party was not in a state of readiness. I also explained that: “Wise incumbents stick to their strategies and adjust them based on prudent and realistic yardsticks.”
Golding in the mentioned meeting admits that his party will have a very difficult time removing the ruling JLP from Jamaica House. For nearly a year Golding and other top-ranking PNP members have been clamouring, “Call it, Andrew, call it!” It was all gimmicks. Golding’s admission in the mentioned meeting, as I see it, confirmed his real mind and also revealed that the PNP’s machinery is lacking in the most important fuel — confidence. To me, Golding has already conceded.
And there was something else in Golding’s mentioned complaining which should not escape the notice of especially well-thinking Jamaicans. He asserted that the JLP controlled the elite. This was the same Mark Golding who said at a local political meeting that he wanted to rule Jamaica with a group of “tapanaris”, which in local parlance means, rich, well-connected individuals who belong to the upper classes, the elites. Golding and the PNP still don’t get it that Jamaica is no longer “PNP country”. The days when folks were impressed with sloganeering are over. The days when a majority was captured by electric charisma have waned. The days when promises, or what we call “puss inna bag”, motived a majority to vote for political representatives are done. Incidentally, in recent days, doubtless in response to massive public pressure, the PNP has started to regurgitate numerous promises made my Golding in his last two budget speech presentations on social media. Promises are not plans. The PNP still don’t get it.
Anyway, well thinking, Jamaicans are still waiting for answers to the following and related questions from Golding:
1) Where are your new and/or better ideas on how to grow the Jamaican economy faster?
2) Where are your new and/or better ideas to remedy the long-standing matter of social decline?
3) Where are your new and/or better ideas to fix the choking issue of major crimes, and murder in particular?
4) Where are your new and/or better ideas to remedy the long-standing challenges in education?
5) Where are your new and/or better ideas to cauterise the Herculean problems associated with squatting, and insufficient access to affordable and decent housing?
We need to be convinced that the Opposition’s ideas are ‘fundable’ and can be operationalised beneficially.
As I see it, the best way forward for Jamaica is sustained economic growth, debt reduction, modernisation, opportunity creation and distribution, social justice advance, and the strengthening of the rule of law. We are on that path now.
Incidentally, I heard a PNP spokesperson boasting recently about how many lawyers are in the PNP. Folks are not, as we say in the rural parts, “frightened” by the flaunting of academic credentials any more. He needs to understand that even graduates of Heaven’s University, who enter local representative politics, are ranked/judged by well-thinking Jamaicans on the bases of the timely delivery of economic and social goods which make the lives of the majority materially better.
Garfield Higgins is an educator and journalist. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or higgins160@yahoo.com
Garfield Higgins
