Mr Gold­ing's ex­am­ple and ex­pressed un­der­stand­ing of the prin­ci­ple ofac­knowl­edg­ing wrong­do­ing and be­ing pre­pared to pay the po­lit­i­cal price for it should be a les­son to all politi­cians and their par­ties in the Caribbean.In ac­knowl­edg­ing that he vi­o­lat­ed the sa­cred trust of the peo­ple of his coun­try, Ja­maican Prime Min­is­ter Bruce Gold­ing has every right not to of­fer him­self for of­fice in next year's gen­er­al elec­tion.In­deed, stat­ing on Sun­day that he be­lieves he lost the sup­port and trust of the Ja­maican peo­ple be­cause of his fun­da­men­tal er­ror by seek­ing to pre­vent the ex­tra­di­tion of Christo­pher "Dudus" Coke to the Unit­ed States to an­swer charges of drugs and gun traf­fick­ing, Mr Gold­ing should re­al­ly have left over one year ago when the in­ci­dent was front page news at home, through­out the Caribbean and in the US.Per­haps Mr Gold­ing's mo­ment of truth has come force­ful­ly to him as the coun­try heads to­wards next year's elec­tions and he is be­gin­ning to feel the re­al­i­ty that he will be pun­ished for mak­ing the coun­try feel shame in front the watch­ing world by do­ing all he could to de­fend a no­to­ri­ous and bru­tal crim­i­nal who was head of the "Show­er Posse," known for show­er­ing bul­lets on their vic­tims. Nonethe­less, promis­ing to leave of­fice be­cause of in­de­fen­si­ble ac­tion is an ex­tra­or­di­nary po­si­tion for a Caribbean politi­cian, more so a Prime Min­is­ter, to adopt. The re­al­i­ty is that Caribbean politi­cians sel­dom ac­cept re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for their ac­tions. In so do­ing, they typ­i­cal­ly of­fer spu­ri­ous rea­sons, some­times no rea­son what­so­ev­er. Most fre­quent­ly, they at­tempt to spin their re­spons­es and seek to tag some­one else for their er­rors.

Mr Gold­ing got in­to trou­ble when he re­fused in May, 2010, to re­lease drug deal­er Coke to the US Gov­ern­ment that was seek­ing him on drug traf­fick­ing mat­ters. The Prime Min­is­ter's po­si­tion was that the ev­i­dence against Coke was il­le­gal­ly ac­quired. He com­pound­ed those ac­tions by join­ing with his Ja­maica Labour Par­ty (JLP) to hire at­tor­neys to block the ex­tra­di­tion of Coke. The longer his­tor­i­cal back­ground to all of this is that the two ma­jor po­lit­i­cal par­ties in Ja­maica, the JLP and the Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Par­ty, have long been be­hold­en to crim­i­nal gangs for sup­port in the vi­o­lence-prone com­mu­ni­ties of West Kingston. In his con­stituen­cy, Tivoli Gar­dens-per­haps the most no­to­ri­ous of them all-Mr Gold­ing court­ed and re­ceived the sup­port of the likes of Dudus Coke. He did this notwith­stand­ing the fact that he had promised as po­lit­i­cal leader of the Na­tion­al De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Move­ment to smash the gar­ri­son com­mu­ni­ties which had sup­port­ed for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Ed­ward Sea­ga for decades and over which Mr Sea­ga had no con­trol. When he re­joined the JLP in time for the 2007 gen­er­al elec­tion, Mr Gold­ing once again took on the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for what the Ja­maica Glean­er calls the "de­gar­rison­i­sa­tion of cer­tain po­lit­i­cal en­claves," Tivoli be­ing one of them. Giv­en the his­to­ry of po­lit­i­cal be­hav­iour by Caribbean politi­cians, we can­not be ab­solute­ly cer­tain that Prime Min­is­ter Gold­ing is not seek­ing to make a grand con­fes­sion and have the par­ty and the Ja­maica elec­torate call him back, for­give and beg him to stay in what he would then say would be in "the best in­ter­est of the coun­try."

But even with the known Anan­cy traits of Caribbean politi­cians, Mr Gold­ing seems to have crossed the "riv­er of no re­turn" and so will have to leave. If how­ev­er he had left im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter re­al­is­ing that his po­si­tion could not be sus­tained, he would have had just a lit­tle more cred­i­bil­i­ty added to how he would be re­mem­bered. In the mean­time, Prime Min­is­ter Gold­ing's ex­am­ple and ex­pressed un­der­stand­ing of the prin­ci­ple of ac­knowl­edg­ing wrong­do­ing and be­ing pre­pared to pay the po­lit­i­cal price for it should be a les­son to all politi­cians and their par­ties every­where in the Caribbean.How many times have we ex­pe­ri­enced politi­cians re­fus­ing to ac­cept re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for their ac­tions, seek­ing in­stead to blame it on oth­ers and putting the best spin pos­si­ble on their ac­tions?