National Men's Conference

When the organizing committee came to see me a few weeks ago, I insisted on them that they should ensure that this conference was attended by two categories of persons. One category would involve those men who recognized that they are lost and can be convinced that they are lost and therefore would want to seek through this dialogue to seek some direction and some guidance. That would have been one category and the other category that I insisted on, is to make sure that you invite and attract to the conference, those men who may not be lost, indeed, may be the very example of the kind of manhood that we want to restore, but who would be prepared to commit themselves to go out there as missionaries in a sense as fishers of men, to go and evangelise the spirit that must inform this conference.

Looking at the audience in front of me, it appears that the room is full of persons from the second category. The first is missing because I do not see anybody here who would represent a poor excuse for the kind of men we want to see take charge of Jamaica.

I am not going to be long with you this morning but I just want to share some concerns. The observation I made is not one that was suddenly dawned on me since I was installed at Jamaica House. There are some problems that this country face that no legislation can fix. People are quick to say, well, we need a law but there are some things that law cannot do.

There are problems that face this country that immobilizes our national spirit, that cannot be fixed by trying to get investments whether foreign or local because there is an element in moving a nation forward, the most important element which is the people that make up that nation and the extent to which they have shared values and shared goals and it has been difficult, proving to be almost impossible to establish those shared values and to decide on those shared goals because as a nation we have lost a sense of who we are. We have lost a sense of right and wrong. We have lost the understanding of how we have to relate to each other and we see it every day.

You look at the crime figures and you wonder how a country of this size can sustain a crime level so high and if you dissect those crime figures, sure you will find a few women here or there but the majority of the persons who are committing those crimes and indeed the majority of the people who are victims of those crimes are men. What is more, they are young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five and perhaps that make our work a little easier for us because at least it tells us where we need to focus. It gives us an idea of where we need to cast that net, that rescue net to try to get a hold of them and to find out what went wrong, and while I do not make excuses for the deviance in our society, in a sense some of what we are witnessing, in a sense it is not their fault. I believe that we as a society have let them down. I believe that we as a society have failed to reinforce the kind of values that would teach us how to bring up our children, how to ensure that our children, despite all the deficiencies in the education system, get the best possible education, that they make something of themselves, and every now and then I see something that gives me hope.

I have a family in Tivoli Gardens, got two children, the boy is going to Kingston College, the girl is going to Merl Grove. Their averages never fall below 94 every term consistently and when I speak to them, the parents were just ordinary people in Tivoli Gardens, mother a simple house maker, father is a construction worker but he is unemployed more often than he is employed and I found it so remarkable because, here they live in the same community as most other kids but those kids are not doing nearly anywhere as well as what they were doing. I wanted to find out whether this was a genetic strain but it could not be genetic and I found it strange because the mother did not do so well in school and the father, maybe a good mason but was not exceptionally so.

I asked one of the research consultants at the Ministry of Education to go and speak to that family for me. Find out what makes the difference and I just got the report from her this week, on Thursday, read it yesterday and what she said is, what made the difference was the father. That father insisted that they go to school. When they got home in the evenings, he sat down with them, he supervised their home work even though he himself did not understand the homework, and when she interviewed the father, he said look, I have had life rough, when I was younger I felt that by the time I get to this age I would be alright, have a car, have a little money in the bank but I have neither car nor the money in the bank and I am determined that my children must not go through what I went through.

He had the perceptiveness to say now look, I can’t give you any wealth because I don’t have it but I am going to make sure that as far as your brain can absorb knowledge, I am going to make sure that you get that knowledge, which says to me that all is not lost. Which says to me that if we can get our men to understand that there is a role that they not only can play but there is a role that perhaps only they can play, we face the possibility – you look at the performance at the kids in school – the girls are doing far better than the boys. Look at the enrolment in our universities – I do not know what the figure is now but at one point it was almost 82% female to 18% men and in a sense you talk to men today and it as if they feel threatened by women. You walk into most offices today and most of the positions there are occupied by women.

It is not that the women are displacing us, it is not that they are pushing us aside. It is that we have abandoned our job, we have abandon our role and they have had to jump in to fill that gap, but the women, God bless their souls they can do so much and no more. Kids ought not to be brought up in a home where they don’t understand what it is like to have a father. I don’t know what it would be like if I grow up in a home and did not have a father. There are kids that have to do because they lost their father but at least in growing up without a father you know why you are growing up without a father - because you lost him but for kids to grow up in a home and don’t understand what a nuclear family is and here I am not getting into the moral argument about whether the mother and father should be married.

I grew up in a little district up in St. Catherine Hills called St. Faiths. My parents were teachers but it was a poor district and living next door to me was a family, Mass Alti Wright and Miss Wilhel and their son called Norbert. I have not seen him for years but the last time I saw him he was working with JUTC. They had seven children and we played together and we grew up together. Father and mother were not married and yet that family was so closely knit. There was so much love in that family. It was no different from mine, so that the collapse of what we know as the nuclear family is not something that is correlated to poverty. I do not accept that. Poor people understand what family is like. They have demonstrated in the past that they do.

Poor people understand the difference between right and wrong and they taught their children the difference between right and wrong. I am not suggesting for one moment that I did not do anything wrong. I did a lot of wrong things when I was a little boy. I did all the things that young boys growing up did. You get your license at 17 and you wait until mommy is fast asleep and you take time and push the Austin Cambridge down the driveway because it is not only that you have to go the party, you have to show off to the girls that you drive a car and if your mother woke up in the middle of the night and did not see her Austin Cambridge parked in the car port, you knew that it is going to be hell and powder house the next morning. But when you were doing the wrong thing you knew it was wrong because your parents taught you the difference between right and wrong and therefore, when you did the wrong thing you knew you were taking a chance but you knew you had cross the line.

You talk to youngsters these days and you say to them, “how could you do that?”, they look at you and said, “what is wrong with that?” you said “but you should not do that and then they give you some asinine comment like everything is everything. Everything cannot be everything and therefore rather than coming here today to sort of preach or lecture to you because you have far more capable people to do that. You have with you my friend for so many years, Alvin Curling who have distinguished himself abroad and have done Jamaica so proud as speaker of the parliament in Ontario, a product of the Excelsior High School I believe and you have a number of people here who are working in these trenches and therefore can bring to your own consideration some of the experiences that they have had.

In trying to correct this problem we do not have to invent the wheel all over again. There are other countries, there are other places, there are other persons who have taken this on and who have achieved levels of success and who can say to us, this is how we need to do it.

I would like very humbly to just suggest to you two things: Firstly, you cannot redeem the men unless you can reach the men and what you do not want is to go out there with a great deal of passion to shout in the dark because it will have no impact and therefore reaching that group of persons who for whatever reason have never been able to understand and do not accept the dept of our role in society, our role in the home, our role in the community, our role in the church as men, you have to target them in whatever way is necessary to reach them and I ask you to bear in mind that we are a culturally pluralistic society so that reaching them is not just a one size fits all approach. You are going to have to use the various media that exists, various means of impacting, in order to make sure that you get the message out there.

I was encouraged recently when I sat down with one of our big reggae artiste, Bounty Killa and I don’t know what his own record on stage has been because many of them behave themselves on stage in a way that would make you want to walk on the other side of the street, but he was very forthcoming. He felt that he had done well, he had achieved more than what he hope he would have been able to achieve. He wanted to give back and he wanted to start using his songs and his performances to try to carry a message and there are others like him.

You are going to need to rope in these people because they can reach people much faster than we can. They have an audience that is loyal to them and to the extent that they are prepared to sing the same tune that we are singing, we need to enlist them. We need to bring them on board.

Secondly, in virtually everything I do these days I have to build into it a mechanism to measure what is the effect of what I am doing otherwise you can find yourself going down a long road and when you believe that everybody is following and when you turn back you see that everybody was left far behind. What I would suggest that you do, in a sense take a leaf out of some of these alternative schemes and by that I mean set up a pyramid so that if you have somebody here who is from Rollington Town, you want that person now to go and recruit another four or five people in that Rollington Town community to bring them into the loop so that what you will be building is a whole army of crusaders out there who are going to be on the ground, on the streets, on the corners, in the community, trying to make an impact, trying to identify, trying to enlist because, the more people we try to get to buy into this endeavour is the more that it is going to become fashionable.

It is the more that those who outside of this understanding are going to feel that they need to jump into this too because this look as if it is this carrying out the swing now. We have to get to that stage where what we have now is a whole army of people out there who are talking to people in their community, who are setting the examples themselves, who are gathering the young men in their fives and sixes and eighteens and twenties under a guango tree to talk to them, to say look, we cannot go on like this my friend, we have to start going on better than this.

We have to create a whole new crusade and if we can do that and do it with the kind of inspiration that I think have given birth to this conference, then we can begin to see a movement out there. If you sow a little seed you would be amazed to know the oak tree that it produces.

I wish this conference well. When I was preparing my new year’ message I indicated in that message that this year we are looking at a national movement. I pointed out that there have been a number of initiatives over recent years aimed at tackling different social problems.

Mr. Patterson for example, had mounted the Values and Attitudes. Mr. Seaga have spoken, although he was not in government but he had made a passionate plea for us to start teaching character education in schools because kids were coming out of school not even knowing who they were. Mrs. Portia Simpson Miller spoke about the importance of the family and trying to extend the concept of the family from the blood relatives to the nation relatives. There are a whole range of non governmental organizations, many of them church driven, who are involved in various intervention trying to rescue our young people, our disabled. You are now focusing on the men and I felt what was necessary was for us to see if we can synchronize all of these things within a broader effort to really get to the core of the problem, building the family, rebuilding trust, improving behaviour, how we relate to each other.

You have a dispute with a man, talk about it, apologise to him if you are wrong and if you feel that he is wrong, talk to him about it but don’t pull out the knife and stab him. If we can begin this kind of dialogue and this kind of indoctrination and I was a little bit apprehensive because I was fearful that if we mounted it and it appeared to be a kind of government initiative or a Bruce Golding initiative, it was not going to gain the level of acceptance, and therefore I met with a group of people, a number of church leaders, NGO’s, activists and arising out of that we have set up a coordinating committee to be anchored out of Jamaica House.

I have asked Rev. Al Miller to coordinate it and I have seen him in Jamaica House almost every day now so it seems as if he is really working there and I know he is working on it and I have told him to make it as broad as possible. To extend the dialogue, to bring in as many people as possible to help to make sure that when it is in fact launched, that it represents the kind of national consensus and national commitment that I think it needs to have and as I wish you well in you own endeavour I am going to urge you to become involve in that process as well because that is seeking to capture all of the sentiments, the urgency, all of the passion with which I think that this conference has been called and I think that not only will that umbrella effort help you in your own mission but I think that you will help to consolidate this broader thrust to try to make Jamaica the wonderful place that God, I am sure intended it to be. God bless you. Have a successful conference.