PUBLISHED| Of Danger, Watchmen, Trumpets, Uncertain Sounds, And Bloody Hands

A-QuEST (Minott)
8 minutes ago
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By Dennis A. Minott, PhD.

August 30, 2026

There are moments in the life of a nation when silence becomes dangerous, warnings become inconvenient, and those appointed to watch begin to behave as though they cannot see. At such moments, the question is no longer merely whether danger exists. The more disturbing question is whether the watchmen have sounded the trumpet clearly enough for the people to recognise it.

The ancient image of the watchman remains extraordinarily relevant. A watchman is not appointed to reassure the city. He is appointed to see what others may not yet see, to distinguish danger from safety, and—when danger approaches—to sound the alarm. His obligation is not to the comfort of those in authority but to the survival of those entrusted to his care.

That distinction matters enormously in Jamaica today.

A democratic State requires institutions, experts, journalists, academics, civil servants, opposition politicians and citizens willing to identify danger before danger becomes disaster. Their responsibility is not simply to possess information. It is to interpret it honestly and communicate it intelligibly.

A trumpet that makes an uncertain sound defeats its very purpose.

This is particularly perilous when governments confront consequential decisions involving energy, public finance, national security, infrastructure, education, health, environmental protection or the management of public resources. In such circumstances, citizens need neither political theatre nor technological evangelism. They need evidence. They need transparent assumptions. They need competing analyses. Above all, they need to know what is known, what is uncertain and what remains unproven.

Instead, we too often encounter confident declarations where rigorous demonstration should be found.

That is how public policy can become detached from public interest.

Consider the energy question. Jamaica possesses abundant renewable resources—sun, wind, biomass and ocean-related possibilities. Yet public discourse can become strangely captivated by expensive, technologically uncertain solutions while comparatively mature renewable technologies are treated as though they were peripheral rather than foundational. The issue is not whether any particular technology should be categorically excluded. The issue is whether Jamaica is making billion-dollar decisions through transparent, comparative analysis—or through political enthusiasm, institutional inertia and the seduction of fashionable technology.

The watchman must ask uncomfortable questions.

What will this cost over its entire life cycle?

Who carries the financial risk?

What happens if projected costs, construction schedules or performance assumptions prove wrong?

What alternatives have been rigorously compared?

What independent evidence supports the government’s claims?

And who benefits if the State gets the decision wrong?

These are not anti-development questions. They are the minimum questions of responsible development.

The same principle extends beyond energy. A government is trustee, not proprietor, of the Jamaican State. Ministers and public officials exercise powers on behalf of citizens. They therefore have a heightened obligation to distinguish between what they wish to be true and what the evidence demonstrates to be true.

When that distinction disappears, democratic accountability begins to erode.

The danger becomes greater when institutions entrusted with scrutiny become reluctant to scrutinise. Parliament becomes less effective when party loyalty overwhelms independent judgment. Regulators become less credible when independence is compromised. Universities diminish themselves when intellectual courage gives way to institutional convenience. The media fail their public duty when access to power becomes more important than interrogation of power.

And citizens become vulnerable when they are encouraged to confuse official certainty with truth.

The biblical metaphor of the watchman contains another uncomfortable lesson. If the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, responsibility does not disappear merely because the resulting disaster was politically inconvenient to acknowledge. The failure to warn can itself become culpable.

This is where my title’s final image—“bloody hands”—becomes important.

Bloody hands need not mean literal violence. They can signify responsibility for preventable consequences: the consequences of ignored warnings, concealed risks, reckless expenditure, institutional cowardice or decisions made without adequate evidence. A person need not have wielded the sword to bear responsibility for having seen it coming and remained silent.

That should concern every Jamaican entrusted with public power.

We should therefore become much more demanding about the language of public policy. “World-class” is not evidence. “Transformational” is not evidence. “Game-changing” is not evidence. “Internationally recognised” is not evidence. Neither is the repeated invocation of experts whose underlying assumptions have never been subjected to serious independent scrutiny.

Evidence is evidence.

A credible government should welcome scrutiny because scrutiny improves decisions. A credible expert should welcome challenge because scientific knowledge advances through challenge. A credible institution should welcome transparency because legitimacy is strengthened—not weakened—when its reasoning is exposed to examination.

The opposite is deeply dangerous.

Sockpuppetry

When inconvenient evidence is dismissed, when dissenters are caricatured as belonging to “a Cabal” by a billioneerer’s network of astroturfed sockpuppets, when questions are treated as disloyalty and when uncertainty is concealed behind extravagant certainty, the trumpet becomes indistinguishable from propaganda.

And then the citizen no longer knows whether to run, remain calm or demand that the watchman explain himself.

Jamaica cannot afford such uncertainty.

We need watchmen who watch. We need trumpets that sound clearly. We need institutions capable of distinguishing warning from alarmism, evidence from assertion, possibility from probability and national interest from private advantage.

Most of all, we need the courage to ask, before decisions become irreversible: Who sounded the warning? Who ignored it? What evidence was available? What alternatives were rejected? Who bears the risk? And who will answer when the consequences arrive?

The gravest failure of a watchman is not that he fails to predict everything.

It is that he sees danger, understands its significance, possesses the means to warn—and chooses silence.