As insidious it is, COVID wears no mask. It is destructive to the delicate human system—a nasty and efficient virus in its class of diseases. Even the scientists are now accepting that like other deadly agents it’s going to stick around indefinitely and we’ll just have to find ways to live with it. Philosophically though, behaviour that damages the lungs of the judicial system is as debilitating to society as COVID. Like the disease that mutates and multiplies itself, so too dysfunctional culture reproduces from generation to generation unless one finds a way to make a decisive intervention.
It’s true that just about everywhere COVID has ravished businesses, economies and consequently livelihoods, and ripped off the masks that covered up incompetence. It has removed the facades of profit as supposedly healthy, reputable companies faced bankruptcy after six months of the pandemic shocks. It has removed the masks of crime and is revealing the demographics of sectors of society living in dire poverty. And too, it took off the masks of many people who’d defaulted for months before on their financial obligations like paying their rent, yet today use the excuse of COVID to protect them from angry landlords. Of course, that’s not the case with most people who have suffered losses of jobs and income. There’re many stories, but the focus here is the excuse that COVID has become for poor performance and institutional weaknesses and failures. Distance learning and reengineering of the education system have been on the national agenda for years. Regionally, the overwhelming outcry from students over the integrity of CXC examination grading process points to the risks associated with sticking to fifty-year-old systems in the face of rapid societal changes ushered in by advances in science and information technology. This is not to underestimate the gale forces of COVID. But so much has changed over 50 years. It shouldn’t have taken us this long to know that Jurassic colonial models are destroying the hopes and dreams of our children. If anything, COVID dramatises the lack of indigenous innovation and the reluctance to tap into the native genius that could propel us into a prosperous future.
The Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Amor Mottley, zeroed into the core of the problem—“lack of cultural confidence” and “self-contempt” that makes us place reliance on external innovations. How well the great Bob Marley said it—emancipate yourself from mental slavery. We can’t seem to get beyond the boundaries of dependence on systems of governance that have no place in any society that wants to progress beyond the past and focus on a bright future.
It is unimaginable that COVID could have anything to do with the intractable problems within the judicial system such as prisoners languishing in the remand years for more than a decade awaiting trial. The issues of dysfunctional culture, insularity, hubris, and incompetence that grease the engines of injustice predate COVID by generations. No meaningful transformation can happen without a change in mindset and cultural values. We must make progressive choices if we are to forge solutions to our problems, eschewing public brawls and opposing simply because we have the freedom to do so.
Some deep-seated problems may well have common-sense solutions. Still, as COVID strips away the masks of hypocrisy and mash-up the plates of inequitable economic and political structures, some are using it to excuse ineptitude. Times have changed, so too the nature, scope and complexity of crime has changed and significantly increased over the past five decades. To continue to shove every criminal case through the DPP’s office simply can’t be a solution to easing the choked-up pipeline regardless of how much money and additional legal skills one may wish to throw at it. There will always be pros and cons to any option, but one solution could be to reconfigure other agencies, giving them the cloak of constitutional independence and the resources to prosecute certain crimes. Admittedly, given the culture, that may well expand too, the opportunities for mischief. But the reality is, nothing will change unless there is a will to brainstorm solutions and begin the process of change from the spectacle of failure of public institutions to reengineering them for success. Take off the masks.