Six times I have wept for Jamaica: for the Federation we abandoned, practical solutions we overlooked, expertise we undervalued, scientific breakthroughs we failed to finance, and brilliant nation-builders such as Dr Cynthia E. Lewis, whose work showed what Jamaica could become. Yet my six times of tears carried hope. My daughter herself, understood that history’s broken Caribbean pieces may still remember the larger shape they were meant to form. The seventh time, God will

"During application season, there were late-night texts, early-morning messages, conversations during holidays, and countless rounds of feedback on essays and supplemental responses. Every draft became stronger because Dr Minott and Dr Thomas were willing to invest so much time and care in us. What stood out most was how personal the guidance felt. Dr Minott encouraged us to prepare a personal inventory—a detailed reflection on our achievements, experiences, interests and id

Tomorrow, however, is the busiest liar on Anansi’s Island. It is always approaching, never arriving. It promises high-value employment that degenerates into temporary subcontracts; national ownership that dissolves into long-term concessions; open market competition that hardens into private monopoly; and national development that somehow requires ordinary insects to remain permanently outside the great milker's gates. The pre-dawn milking invariably begins with public

It is not necessarily caused by recklessness. The people experiencing it are often disciplined workers who rise early, travel far, perform necessary jobs and return home exhausted. They have calculated the supermarket bill, postponed the dentist, reduced the electricity usage, stretched the cooking gas and told the children that the requested school item will have to wait. Still, the money finishes first. The trouble is that too many Jamaicans are paid too little to partici

In Anansi’s Island, the road to riches is seldom straight. The old spider of folklore survived by wit because he was small & vulnerable. His modern descendants have improved the method. They use influence, opacity & public money, then call the outcome development. A way to become rich is to discover a nat'l crisis before everyone else does.

Jamaica should not become a tropical testing ground for an immature technology while immediate solutions—grid automation, rooftop solar, wind, biomass, microgrids, storage and energy efficiency—remain insufficiently pursued. Pause the spending. Publish the evidence. Answer the seven questions... Read More Online

I am writing to express my profound gratitude for... Read More Online

What began as a small mentoring tradition eventually became an international educational movement. More than 7K young people have now passed through A-Q and its related initiatives, and the number continues to grow, though more slowly today through online engagement. Its alumni include Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Belizeans, Americans, Bahamians, Antiguans, Brazilians, Haitians, Saint Lucians, Grenadians, Guyanese, Nigerians, Japanese, Koreans, Burmese, Caymanians, Pakistanis, I

The Prime Minister deserves credit for encouraging discussion about Jamaica's long-term energy future. Such conversations are necessary and welcome. However, ambition must remain tethered to sound, scientific, and engineering reality. The electrical grid does not respond to speeches, headlines, or technological fashion. It responds to engineering competence, disciplined maintenance, resilient institutions, and sound economics. Jamaica's path forward is neither mysterious n

There is a curious phenomenon that periodically appears in Jamaican public policy. A difficult national problem emerges. The hard work of institutional reform, technical competence, disciplined maintenance, and long-term planning remains unfinished. Yet instead of addressing those fundamentals, influential voices become captivated by a grand technological solution promising to leapfrog reality. The latest manifestation is the renewed enthusiasm for Small Modular Reactor

Fukushima taught the world an important lesson. Complex systems fail not merely because of a single event, but because multiple events can overwhelm assumptions embedded within a design. Even if a Jamaican SMR survived a major hurricane intact, the transmission and distribution infrastructure connecting it to consumers might not. A generating plant, however sophisticated, serves little purpose if the lines carrying its electricity are down. The Jun 5 blackout was a signal,

The future of Jamaica may depend upon recovering precisely this discipline. Not more information. Not more commentary. Not more amplification. Better discernment of signals. The question is whether we possess the wisdom, courage, and discipline to recognise them. And having recognised them, whether we possess the character to act.

'The Holness administration has delivered significant infrastructure projects, navigated the pandemic, and maintained macroeconomic stability under an IMF programme. These are not small things. But the question posed by the composite animal thesis is not whether the government has accomplished anything. It is whether the manner of governing—the centralization of discretion, the impatience with oversight, the erosion of institutional courage—is creating a political architectu

Not a dictator in the old Caribbean style. Not a crude strongman. Not even a simple autocrat. Those labels are too primitive for the political architecture now taking shape before our eyes. The modern democratic age rarely produces naked tyrants. What it increasingly generates are hybrid creatures: who weaken the moral, institutional, and psychological foundations of accountability, who retain elections, market themselves as modernisers....Read More Online

In the urgent public debate over educational accountability across Jamaica and the wider Caribbean Community (CARICOM), a vital public service has been performed by commentator Christopher McCurdy. By insisting that institutional responsibility cannot remain an optional luxury within our school system, his public interventions point directly at a gaping wound in our national development strategy. He is entirely correct. Yet, if we are to move beyond mere diagnosis and enginee

The government’s primary defence is that NaRRA is a "necessary hybrid"—a specialized tool built for the "harsh climate" of the 21st century. A truly resilient reconstruction effort would empower local communities, utilize the expertise of existing environmental agencies, & operate with such transparency that public trust becomes its greatest asset. Instead, the NaRRA Bill offers a "monoculture" of power. It assumes that speed is more valuable than fairness, & that central co

There is a quiet war being waged in Jamaica. It is not fought with guns. It is not debated in Parliament. It does not announce itself in headlines. Yet it is steadily eroding the integrity of our democracy, distorting our markets, and undermining legitimate professionalism. It is the war of the sockpuppet. The term may sound trivial—almost comical. It is not. In the digital age, “sockpuppetting” refers to the deliberate creation of multiple false online identities to manip

How Manufactured Consensus Masks Jamaica’s Energy Future In the lexicon of digital forensics, sockpuppetting is the act of creating multiple online identities to deceive. Unlike a pseudonym used for privacy, a sockpuppet is a tool of coordination. These artificial personas are designed to create the illusion of grassroots support, harass dissenters, and skew the perception of public consensus. When deployed as an "alias army,"....Read More

In the lexicon of digital forensics, sockpuppetting is the act of creating multiple online identities to deceive. Unlike a simple pseudonym used for privacy, a sockpuppet is a tool of manipulation. It is an artificial persona designed to create the illusion of grassroots support, to harass dissenters, or to skew the perception of public consensus. When these digital ghosts are deployed in tandem—an "alias army"...Read More

The plate looks full in the brochure. But the nourishment on the ground is tragically uneven. This is not accidental. It is structural. It is what I have called, without apology, the age of Jamaican billioneering. Billioneering is not merely about the extraction of wealth. It is about the theatrical display of wealth—its amplification, its projection, and its eventual conversion into political currency. It is the high art of appearing abundantly resourced and "investable"