The Caribbean’s scattered geography need not condemn us to scattered power. Malaysia shows how culturally diverse territories, separated by sea, can operate within a serious federal structure. The Philippines demonstrates that thousands of islands can still function as one national market and one international force. Meanwhile, CARICOM remains rich in declarations but poor in enforceable unity. Jamaica struggles within the confines of a small economy; Haiti’s agony is treate

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.

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

The prevailing economic model in Jamaica is not development; it is a meticulously structured extraction. It is a system of “billioneering” off Jamaica by money-men, rather than investing in Jamaica. To understand the mechanics of this modern economic bypass, one must examine the structural pipelines of our two most critical national domains: tourism and energy.

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

'A photograph decorates a wall; knowledge equips a life. If this difficult episode encourages Jamaica to invest more deeply in literacy, numeracy, teacher development, early intervention and genuine educational equity, then something valuable will emerge from this disappointment. Educational equity does not mean pretending that every child has reached the same destination. It means ensuring that every child receives the support necessary to get there.'... Read More Online

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.

Jamaica, meanwhile, continues to behave as though literacy is solely the responsibility of classroom teachers. The evidence suggests otherwise. The irony is that the country already possesses a potentially transformative workforce. It is called the Jamaica Library Service...Read More

In simple language, Titchfield repeatedly did more with less. Its success was not explained by elite intake. It was explained by educational effectiveness. The school transformed students. That kind of reality should have profoundly influenced educational policy discussions. Instead, another trend was quietly gathering momentum. Across Portland and beyond, a growing proportion of students began identifying themselves not as science students but as “business students.

Schools’ Challenge Quiz may continue to entertain, inspire and emotionally unite Jamaicans for many years to come. But unless the country develops the courage to distinguish educational spectacle from educational substance, SCQ will remain what it has quietly become: An elaborate national performance of academic prestige by pretence.

Why is it that whenever high office is implicated, the machinery of justice slows to a cautious, glacial crawl? Why does constitutional scrutiny lose its existential urgency precisely where public trust most desperately requires it? The pattern has become predictably formulaic....Read More

We continue tolerating what can only be described as rag-tag educational reporting cultures. In some schools, grades appear inflated without meaningful standardisation. In others, records remain partially paper-based and vulnerable to deterioration, disappearance, manipulation, or prolonged delay. Elsewhere, transcript preparation depends excessively upon the diligence or competence of a single administrator. That is unacceptable in 2026. Worse still, the absence of integra

'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