Ronald Thwaites | On family life

There is no society which has prospered without the foundation of stable families.

Nikki is 30, petite and pretty. Looks like she’s slightly spaced out but denies any drug use other than cigarettes. (How does she or anyone afford them anyway?). She admits to having two children. Says their father cares for them. She seems to have little contact with them. She hangs back at the Cathedral door and begs a food money after service.

SUSPECT STATISTICS

I wonder into what category she fits in the labour market surveys. She says an MPM sweeper who has a bad back asks her to clean up her spot every once in a while for a few hundred dollars. Nikki considers herself employed. Through experience, I have developed a healthy scepticism about many categories of official statistics, especially when they are related to a politically sensitive issue. What will we make of the patch-up census near at hand. Effete even before its birth. It has taken more time to finish than Caesar Augustus’s effort did in Jesus’ time.

NON-WORKERS

Anyway, I expect Nikki will be classified in that nearly half million of Jamaican humanity who, although of working age, fall outside the labour market. We conveniently forget that these non-workers have to eat every day and most often have family obligations. And, why are they outside the market? Why don’t they work? What drag are they on the rest of us? How sustainable is this?

Otherwise, because of her ‘roast’, she will be one of the scandalously underemployed who we deceive ourselves to call employed. Despite her hunger, this classification keeps the jobless figure politically depressed. Just like we do with the literacy figures.

I think of Nikki in relation to the 2030 vision. Where does she and her kind figure? Will she be in a better place in five years’ time? What policies give her hope? Do the people at the international agencies and our Planning Institute mingle with humanity like her to understand their needs?

FAILED EDUCATION

As a child, Nikki boxed around among two or three relatives after her mother went away “to look better”. They have lost touch long time. Her high-school experience was an expensive failure. Inevitably, the children started coming in Grade 9.

She says she has skills in “enterpenureship”(sic) but never bothered to pick up the certificate. She holds out little hope of working for money. Her experience, and maybe wired into her DNA, is the notion that money is something she must get; something she must be given. Effort is tiresome and futile. “ Just sponsor me a pound of chicken back, nuh”? Her attitude to survival is common to tens of thousands more.

I’m hoping that her babyfather has found a good partner who will take care of Nikki’s two children. God help the society if that has not happened.

SOLUTIONS?

I hear you saying that Nikki is an extreme case and that I should send her to JAMAL (what’s that anymore?), to register with PATH (really!), or go down by Fr Ho Lung. Truth is that there are enough like her to replicate the social and productive problems keeping Jamaica down.

It would likely have been different if Nikki had been raised in a stable, even if informal and materially poor, family situation by her parents. She would have been prepared at home, in church and school to respect the connection between sexual expression, love and the supreme vocation of parenting.

Education, employment, housing, taxation and public propaganda can be calibrated to encourage and incentivise family values to make it easy for people to marry, have lasting unions and raise children.

This promotion would have to be far more pointed and intense than the current ethos which presents marriage and stable parental relationships as a somewhat fashionable but dispensable extra on the road to personal satisfaction.

Chronic unresolved animosity, distance or disdain between mother and father are dangers to their children. How do you think Nikki’s kids will think of their mother and of motherhood as they grow?

Fostering stable family life is as important an issue for national concern and action as is constitutional reform and economic growth.

MORALITY AND THE BUDGET

Not unconnected is Bishop Garth Minott’s assertion last week that the National Budget is a moral document. Of course it is. Every year, government takes from our pockets what it pleases, determines its use by a flawed, rushed and opaque process that determines who lives, who dies, who flourishes, and who is suppressed. Huge issues of right and wrong choices, principled versus expedient decisions are at stake.

As an MP, whenever I tried to scrutinise the figures and question the process, I would be told to “Siddung” or “Go back a Church” or “Trust the Government, they won the election “. Hell, no!

Hopefully with prodding like the bishop’s, the almost moribund church associations and bruk-pocket civil society groups can come together to insist on a more moral way of spending the nation’s trillions to achieve God’s kingdom “on earth as it is … .”.

WE ARE BLESSED

Amid all our worries and warts, check out last Wednesday ‘s publication of Bruce Golding’s anthem “We Are Blessed”. It is an ode to the Jamaica we love, in contrast to the raging despotism of “Elsewhere”. It should stir every native sinew to cherish the freedoms we have wrought for ourselves and watch out for local menacing tendencies to ‘follow backa’ the big “Elsewhere”.

WHEEL AND COME AGAIN

To this end, it can’t be helpful for Andrew to send Mark to Delroy to rework the constitutional reform process. Nothing can come of that. Without more, that approach smells of pride, status obsession and mistrust. Such attitudes ill befit you, Sir.

After the manifest waste of the past effort and your own recent words, Most Honourable, nothing other than urgent, regular, open and humble dialogue between Mark, yourself - and the people - will do.

Help realise our desire to travel together on a highway leading to fundamental reforms reflecting common good principles, family values and inclusive governance. Not some cul-de-sac ‘Road to Republic’ which leaves us largely where we are - out of the frame of agency and ever more dependent on “unno”.

Please don’t disappoint us this time.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com