THEY ARE TELLING JAMAICA’S PM THE “F-WORD"

A Thunderclap from the Pulpit of a Packed Little Church on Worship Morning

By Dennis A. Minott, PhD.

September 13, 2026

There is an “F” word being spoken across Jamaica. I shall not print it. A Christian pulpit should not need profanity to tell the truth, and a national argument should not require obscenity to make itself heard. But there is another reason for my restraint: the unprinted word is less important than the material breakdown that has produced it.

The word is being generated by frustration. By fear. By favouritism. By failure. By forgetfulness. By the feeling of being forgotten. By the perception that ordinary Jamaicans are treated as inconvenient bystanders while state power is wielded to protect access, capital, and political convenience.

Above all, it is generated by a growing sense that citizens across our fourteen parishes are simply, utterly fed up.

When citizens reach this point, something far more dangerous than anger takes hold. The reservoir of political trust is drained dry. When trust disappears, a government may retain its constitutional mandate while forfeiting something far more precious: its moral authority. That distinction ought to trouble every serious leader. It ought especially to trouble a Prime Minister.

Frustration and Favouritism: The Broken Social Contract

Frustration does not arrive like a lightning bolt. It accumulates. One unkept promise follows another. One unexplained blackout follows another. One public asset is privatized while citizens are locked out.

Consider our coastline. While the political class celebrates tourism growth metrics, ordinary Jamaicans experience the systematic, aggressive denial of access to their own beaches. From Portland to St. Ann, public access points are barred, quietly monetized, or transferred to commercial operators. When Jamaicans cannot step onto the sand of their own birthland without paying a fee or being turned away by private security, favouritism ceases to be an abstract complaint. It becomes a spatial, daily humiliation. Citizens correctly conclude that connections and corporate capital matter more than their constitutional patrimony.

The Government makes an elementary error when it dismisses this anger as opposition-manufactured partisan noise. Some criticism is inevitably partisan. But the cry echoing from rural fishing villages and urban townships is the authentic voice of citizens who see a one-sided social contract: the executive decides, the developer profits, and the citizen adjusts. Democracy cannot sustainably operate as a spectator sport where the sovereign people are treated merely as an audience.

Failure and Forgetfulness: Policy by Distraction

There is a word politicians abhor above all others: failure. Yet sound governance—like basic Christian morality—prohibits concealing failure behind public relations theater.

When Jamaica suffered an islandwide electrical grid collapse on June 5, it exposed a chronic weakness in maintenance culture, operational oversight, and network resilience. The rational response to a fragile 700-megawatt grid is disciplined investment in indigenous green renewables, sodium-ion battery energy storage systems, and transmission upgrades. Instead, the Prime Minister offered technological wishful thinking: advocating for Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) within the decade. Introducing 100-megawatt nuclear units onto an unstable, islanded grid is not energy strategy; it is an expensive distraction from foundational maintenance failure.

A similar policy failure quietly dismantled our public health architecture. For nearly half a century, foreign medical bilateral agreements—most notably with Cuban doctors and nurses—served as the operational backbone of rural primary care. They filled critical gaps in district health centers from St. Thomas to Hanover. Yet, when the bilateral framework collapsed, the administration permitted the contract to expire without a viable, trained alternative ready to step into the breach. When a rural mother arrives at a parish clinic to find no doctor present because executive diplomacy failed to secure medical continuity, that is not an administrative oversight. It is a surrender of health sovereignty.

Fear and Alienation: The Threat of Silence

Fear in a democracy takes subtle forms. It is not always the fear of state violence; it is the fear of retribution, the loss of contracts, the denial of permits, or the political isolation of those who speak truth to authority.

Whenever citizens calculate the personal cost of challenging a minister, a policy, or a board appointment, democracy suffers structural damage. A patriot can challenge a ministry without committing treason. A parent questioning an education policy, an academic dissenting from an economic narrative, or a columnist exposing administrative incompetence are not enemies of the state. They are the essential self-correcting mechanisms of a free society.

Yet, the greatest danger facing the executive is not the loud critic. It is the silence of the forgotten. The forgotten are the quiet Jamaicans: the civil servants, the small farmers, the micro-entrepreneurs, and the parents struggling against food inflation and crumbling public services. They do not dominate social media, nor do they appear on television panels. But they archive every broken assurance. They compare past speeches with present realities.

The political class must never confuse silence with satisfaction. Silence is often the final stage of political alienation—the moment when citizens conclude that argument no longer matters because the government has stopped listening.

The Constitutional “Enough”

When something goes wrong, the executive instinct is to point fingers: at the Opposition, the global economy, the bureaucracy, or a public that allegedly "does not understand."

Leadership requires taking responsibility where responsibility belongs. Biblical tradition does not instruct the preacher to become a courtier in the king's palace. Nathan confronted David; Elijah confronted Ahab. They measured their duty not by how comfortable they made authority, but by whether they spoke the unvarnished truth.

Jamaica's mysterious “F” word is not the four-letter profanity shouted in frustration on a street corner. The profanity is merely compressed emotional steam. The real “F” word is the structured vocabulary of systemic failure:

• Frustration with one-sided governance and closed-door decision-making.

• Fear of speaking out against administrative overreach and bureaucratic patronage.

• Favouritism in coastal allocation, land rights, and state contracts.

• Failure in basic grid management, health sovereignty, and institutional oversight.

• Forgetfulness of election-year promises and democratic covenants.

• Finger-pointing when policy assumptions collapse under real-world pressures.

  
  

Prime Minister, listen to the uncomfortable voices. A leader surrounded exclusively by applause is in far greater danger than a leader surrounded by rigorous critique. The flatterer protects his access; the critic protects the country.

The Jamaican people do not need profanity to deliver a devastating political verdict. They can deliver it constitutionally, peacefully, and decisively at the ballot box. They can deliver it simply by saying: “Enough.”

That is the F-word a government ignores at its peril. For governments do not fall because someone writes an offensive word on a wall. They fall when the people decide that those in power have stopped listening—and quiet disengagement turns into the quiet power of the vote.

Dr. Dennis A. Minott is a physicist, energy systems consultant, and Chief Executive Officer of A-QuEST (Association of Quietly Excellent Scholars and Thinkers). He writes from Boundbrook, Port Antonio, Portland.