On Tuesday (6) Jamaica celebrates its 51^st anniversary of Independence from Great Britain. Upon Jamaica’s independence in 1962, the Cayman Islands broke its administrative links with Jamaica and opted to become a direct dependency of the British Crown.

From 1863, the Cayman Islands were officially declared and administered as a dependency of Jamaica but were rather like a parish of Jamaica with the nominated justices of the peace and elected vestrymen in their Legislature. From 1750 to 1898 the Chief Magistrate was the administrating official for the dependency, appointed by the Jamaican governor. In 1898 the Governor of Jamaica began appointing a Commissioner for the Islands. Upon the formation of the Federation of the West Indies the dependency status with regards to Jamaica ceased officially although the Governor of Jamaica remained the Governor of the Cayman Islands and had reserve powers over the Islands.

So what would have happened if Cayman had opted to stay with Jamaica and break from Britain?

There are a growing number of Caymanians, especially with the younger adults who would like to try “their luck” and go it alone. It is no secret Cayman’s ex-premier, McKeeva Bush, would like to travel that road that to me has always seemed a pathway to ruin. But I could be wrong.

I have always thought Jamaica’s choice in going for Independence has been a failure. Again, I could be wrong.

I found a very interesting opinion piece written last year by Linton P. Gordon who writes many such items to the North Coast Times Jamaica.

This is what he said:

THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS–Success or Failure?

Posted on August 9, 2012

Linton P. Gordon

There is now a lively debate on whether we have made a success or a failure of our 50 years of nationhood. Those who consider that we have failed have put forward reasons for arriving at that conclusion. Those who consider that we have succeeded have put forward their reasons for considering our 50 years of existence to be one of success.

I am on the side of those who hold the view that we have made a success of our first 50 years of existence. Jamaica gained its Independence during a period of rapid de-colonization started in the 1950s and continuing in the 1960s. Several of the States that gained Independence around the time we did have gone through various periods of political upheaval including military coups, civil wars and insurrection. We have avoided such experiences. However, to properly assess whether we have failed or succeeded in our first 50 years we need to assess the progress or lack of progress in areas that open avenues for the vast majority of our citizens.

When we gained independence from Britain, we had one university, The University of the West Indies (UWI) which was very small and therefore offering limiting access to us. We also had a limited number of other tertiary institutions mainly teachers’ colleges. Today, we have several more universities scattered all over the country, with access available in just about every one of our major towns.

In the area of health, we face several challenges and no one can conclude that our health facilities are ideal. However, we have fairly modern hospitals in May Pen, Mandeville and Montego Bay which never existed when we got independence. We have more doctors and dentists per capita, our infant mortality rate is as low as any first world country and we have been able to successfully deal with all threats of epidemics. The growing threat of obesity apart, the nation is far healthier than we were at the time of Independence.

In the area of housing, we have also made much progress in providing shelter for our population. Even though squatting is widespread there are far fewer persons living in dilapidated condition than at Independence. Over 80% of the population live in homes with public electricity supply. This is a far cry from what it was in 1962. In 1962, the vast majority of black Jamaicans were excluded from the professions, the economy and from certain areas of employment. For example, it was difficult if not impossible to find a black bank teller in 1962. There was in fact widespread and established racism practiced in Jamaica as most doors were slammed in the face of the black majority but widely opened for the white. Today, 50 years after Independence, the vast majority of black Jamaicans have proudly marched through all these doors, hitherto closed and have taken their rightful position in various areas by virtue of meritocracy and not by virtue of who they are.

POLITICS

We should never discount the importance of how politically mature we are as a nation. Since our Independence we have had a number of national elections and even though there have been instances of political maneuvering and garrison politics, on a whole, our democracy remains intact and is indeed the envy of several countries that have lost their way since gaining independence.

Perhaps a good example of our adherence to our political tradition is what occurred during the 80s when the PNP boycotted the parliamentary elections resulting in the JLP winning all 60 seats and being the only party in Parliament. During this period, the then Prime Minister Edward Seaga did everything to maintain our democratic way. He appointed to the Senate a number of persons whom he considered independent and he never used his control of Parliament to enact any law that would have endangered our democracy. We need to give Mr. Seaga more credit for protecting our democracy during this period.

My conclusion therefore is that Jamaica has made a success of its 50 years of Independence. We have not achieved everything we wanted to and we have not done everything that should have been done. However, there can be no doubt that we have all right to take pride in our 50 years of Independence. So let us all celebrate and let us commit ourselves to doing better for the next 50 years.

To read the original go to:

http://northcoasttimesjamaica.com/2012/08/the-first-fifty-years-success-or-failure/

His point concerning Edward Seaga is well made.

I have to wonder if that would have been the case if some of Cayman’s politicians would have done the same if the situation was reversed?

The one area where Mr. Gordon has not touched on is crime.

The Jamaican Gleaner published an article on Sunday November 25^th 2012 by Bernard Headley that tackled this subject head on:

The Next 50 Years – Let’s End This 50-Year Relationship With Crime

The data can be at times fuzzy, since back in 1962, we weren’t nearly as mindful as we are today about matters dealing with crime. Nonetheless, those of us who crunch the available numbers and do the analyses are at one in concluding: violence became endemic and incidents of both common and organised crime skyrocketed in Jamaica in the years following Independence.

They have remained extraordinarily high since then.

We who were around as high-school youngsters in the immediate pre-Independence years can recall that, back then, a murder, whether in the village, heard about on RJR or read of in The Gleaner, was a tale filled with dread and horror.

Those sometimes gruesome killings were typically of the ‘man-goes-berserk-and-shoots-(or-chops-up)-wife/lover-and/or children’ variety, and indeed, we still have these!

But it was not until the late 1960s, five or six years into Independence, when we first heard of strings of killings that were random, politically fuelled, gang-led, or from gang feuds, donmanship or shoot-outs.

We’d always thought that the latter happened only on forbidden movie screens in John Wayne westerns and in the ‘adventures’ of the 1940s’ folkloric Rhygin, our first bad man.

Most disquieting as we look back, though, is the manner in which crime’s violent ethos – its seductions and signification – has become commonplace.

The Trend

One of our early, astute crime analysts, Dudley Allen, noted in the 1980s that the country’s violent crime rates doubled (and then some) during the first 12 years following Independence.

From 1962 to 1974, manslaughter rates increased by 167 per cent, robbery by 771 per cent, rape by 160 per cent, felonious wounding by 137 per cent, and shooting with intent by 1,350 per cent.

For the more recent years, the Planning Institute of Jamaica has each year consistently reported high numbers for all serious crimes.

But let’s stay with homicides, the most reliable index of serious crime.

Homicide rates for the nation climbed from a low of eight or nine murders per 100,000 inhabitants in each of the years leading up to Independence to an astounding 40 and 45 murders per 100,000 in the 1990s.

And from 2005 to the end of 2007, the rate skyrocketed to 60 murders per 100,000, or more than 1,500 persons murdered annually, and those figures do not include victims of police action.

The number of murders jumped to 1,682, or 63 murders per 100,000 in 2009.

We may have experienced, in the last year or so, unexceptional declines from that 2009 high, but reflect for a moment on these figures.

DRASTIC CRIME INCREASE

The raw facts are that we moved from a low of fewer than 80 homicides per year at the time of Independence to a high of more than 1,600 in the years since independent self-governance.

For every 100,000 Jamaicans alive in 1961-62, at most nine of them stood the chance of being killed by a gunman, robber or ‘loved one’; 60 and more of them would at the end of the last decade.

Looked at another way, the chance of exiting life in a manner dictated by another human being (other than the State) has increased more than sevenfold since Independence.

Over the last 10 years, Jamaicans living on the ‘rock’ stood a far greater likelihood of being stabbed, beaten or shot to death than did the people in neighbouring, battered Haiti!

Responsible

But what would have been responsible 50 or 60 years ago for the murder rate being as low as it was then?

And what would have changed so dramatically to cause the figure to have climbed to the horrendous numbers they are today?

The overriding explanation lies, paradoxically, in the social contradictions, the cross-cutting processes inherent to our transition to Independence, economic self-reliance and modernisation.

Thanks to agencies like the United Nations, the World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Corporation and Development, we are not in short supply of scholarly research that have documented sets of universal, unintended but seemingly ineluctable, negative side effects that have accompanied independence and national modernisation projects.

A current overview commissioned by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), for instance, points to the links between outcomes of modernisation and growth in crime and violence; the outcomes of concern being rapid urbanisation and persistent poverty, coupled with rising inequality.

Let’s examine, briefly, how these particular forces coalesced in Jamaica’s post-Independence story to bring upon us our terrible crime trouble.

Illusive industrialisation and drift to hollow cities

In 1955, the Jamaican population numbered just barely over one million people.

We lived then, not always happily, in mostly rural communities.

Close to 80 per cent of us lived in districts and towns that numbered 5,000 people or less.

Several communities across the length and breadth of the island, but particularly in the parishes of Westmoreland, St James, St Elizabeth, Clarendon and (rural) St Catherine, were reasonably well sustained by the growth and harvesting of sugar cane; and by manufacture of sugar and related products in sugar factories.

A major programme of upgrading the sugar industry in the 1950s, coupled with guaranteed markets (at guaranteed ‘good’ prices), saw the worth of sugar increase by 170 per cent between 1943 and 1953.

Profitability in the industry, and its ability to not only generate jobs but also to sustain whole communities, continued up until 1965.

Sugar was, therefore, integral to our storied early-1960s economic growth, as financial analyst Dennis Chung wrote in a July 27 column in The Observer.

A measure of self-sufficiency had characterised the towns and districts that came under the sway of sugar.

Moreover, small-scale farming, which frequently supplemented income from sugar, added resilience to tight-knit rural life.

Village elders bonded and shared wisdom and expertise with youngsters.

Informal agencies and abundance of social capital worked well to socialise and insulate.

And the agencies – extended family, the Church, the neighbour, the district constable – were equally effective at unobtrusively maintaining order and discipline, and at restraining youthful impulse.

But sugar’s downward spiral, which began in the mid to late 1960s, brought erosion in the natural ‘mechanical solidarity’ it had engendered in village life.

As people migrated out of communities in search of new livelihoods, the influence of village life on behaviour weakened; and whole communities fell apart.

The new livelihoods, jobs in industry, that the new nation’s leadership classes had promised the displaced were, however, in short supply.

By the end of the 1960s, hordes of the uprooted had nonetheless made their way, children in tow, into and on the outskirts of the island’s three or four main urban centres. They’d come in search of new kinds of work.

The result … you guessed it! As Kingston, lower St Andrew, Spanish Town, May Pen and Montego Bay expanded in population size and geographic scale, so also did the spread of urban poverty and inequality.

“It was the concern with the extent of urban poverty and the vast differences between neighbourhoods in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that triggered the expansion of social enquiry into urban life, including in cities such as Chicago.

“Early sociologists found that the relationships between inequality, exclusion and criminal and interpersonal violence were more intense in settings characterised by unequal distribution of resources.

“Not only was criminal violence more pronounced in cities, but intra-urban disparities in violence were correlated with neighbourhood income levels: higher income areas suffered from property-related violent crime and more severe forms of violence (chronic or otherwise) concentrated in lower income settings.

“Many of these same observations are recorded in studies of inequality and criminal violence in the 21st century” (IDRC, 2012).

Inequality in urban contexts is a form of structural violence, which then triggers the more reactionary forms of violence.

The kind of inequality and deprivation referred to here, though, “are not limited exclusively to income, but also (to) lack of access to basic social services, lack of state protection, exposure to systematic corruption, and inefficiencies that most acutely affect the poor”.

In situations of widespread and severe inequality, the urban poor are undervalued and marginalised, their daily living conditions heightened by the potential for conflict, and they become, above all other disastrous consequences, ‘available’ for pain, waste and destruction-to, among others, disreputable ‘big’ men and nefarious politicians.

Homicide rates inside branded ‘volatile’ communities of Kingston-lower St Andrew and Spanish Town are not 50 and 60 murders per year, per 100,000 inhabitants, by the way; rather, they are consistently in the region of 300 to 400 murders per year, per 100,000 people, as the works of colleague Professor Anthony Harriott indicate.

Children who had travelled in tow with parents in the 1960s would, in the years following Independence, morph into and reproduce two generations of hardened ‘Johnny Too Bads’. ‘Walkin’ down the road’ with a weapon in their waists, they could just as easily slit throats and make duppies of each other as they could ‘make’ babies – with the same lack of regard, or equal delight.

To read the whole article go to:

http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20121125/lead/lead7.html

The article ends with an idea to “assemble the various scholars from across the faculties to propose long-term strategies that could effectively lead to reduction in harms and overall aggression in the society”.

Mr. Headley was given charge of writing the group’s final document. Crime, Peace and Justice in Jamaica: A Transformative Approach. The final recommendation called for establishment of a Peace (& Development) Institute, to search for, as a 2012 Inter-Development Bank report put it, ‘antipodes’ to violence.

“Because a balanced development and nation-building strategy ought to include understanding, teaching and practising the ways of peace – respect and tolerance, healing and restoration, love and justice.

“These are, in the final analysis, the ultimate ‘protective factors’ against crime and disorder.”

He sadly laments that “We haven’t received much traction for the Peace Institute idea in the almost 12 years (and more than 12,000 additional murders) since we proposed it – though hope lives eternal … .”

Congratulations are in order to Jamaica for starting another 50 years.

If we in Cayman do take the same road there is much history to assess. The problem is, as history proves, history repeats itself and not only the good things.

For now I am pleased Cayman is still part of Great Britain but I do wonder for how long.

When we do go down that road we will at least have a day set aside for our independence and can “celebrate” it.