Louise “Miss Lou” Bennett is undisputedly the most universally loved personality this nation has ever produced. For over 50 years as poet, broadcaster, actress, television personality and stage performer she tirelessly championed Jamaican folk customs. Yet Miss Lou was more than a brilliant entertainer, she is in all likelihood the greatest poet this country has produced. Certainly she is the only Jamaican poet whose works are continuously in print and she still outsells all the others put together.

Last week I came across an article entitled “Growth May Be Good for the Poor - But are IMF and World Bank Policies Good for Growth?”. The answer as usual is, it depends who you ask. However the following chart surprised me.

“Knowledge” said Francis Bacon “is power”. And the more knowledgeable an electorate the more powerful a democracy is in terms of carrying out the true will of the people. With this goal of empowering the electorate through information in mind, the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce (JCC) intends to organize both national and constituency debates in the forthcoming general elections.

Our next general election might be the closest since independence. And given the quirks of Westminster and our “garrison” constituency phenomenon, all sorts of scenarios are possible. Here for instance the most recent Stone and Anderson polls are extrapolated over the 1997 constituency results.

“There’s no humourist like history” the American author Will Durant once wrote, a truth confirmed yet again by recent events in Cuba. Who in the heyday of communist solidarity could have predicted that then staunch “socialist” allies Cuba and the Czech Republic would one day be embroiled in a human rights controversy? But last month Cuban authorities jailed two Czech citizens on charges of subversion. Their “crime” was meeting Cuban dissidents. Predictably Cuban officials condemned the two men as “American agents” and the dissidents as “counter-revolutionaries”.

The North East St. Ann by election was a minor triumph for Jamaican democracy. For once there were no cries of bogus voting. And from all reports violence was almost non-existent, continuing the trend towards peaceful campaigns that has became quite noticeable over the past few elections. We’ve come a long way baby since the near civil war of 1980.

Jamaica is not a country of comfortable certainties. Take the recent Braeton shootings where police killed seven youths. Like most people my first reaction was “Yes, seven gunmen less on the streets!” But when some reports cast doubts on the police version of events I began to wonder if it had indeed been a case of extra judicial murder.

When I came back to live in Jamaica in 1989 after being away at school for over a decade I used to wonder how a land so God blessed with natural resources could be so poor. Having lived and done business here for twelve years I now wonder how a country so lackadaisical and careless has not sunk under the sea.

Whatever else it may be Jamaica is seldom boring. In few places is human nature’s eternal battle between reason and instinct thrown so regularly into stark focus. We may be one of the world’s most stable liberal democracies, but our behaviour regularly echoes the most ancient law of existence – might is right.

Whatever else he may be, Edward Seaga is unique. He must be the only non-native born white man ever elected prime minister of a predominantly black country. And has anyone else in recent times played such prominent roles in both the cultural and political development of a nation? A pioneer in Jamaican anthropology; a driving force behind the popularization of ska; an originator of Festival; arguably our best finance minister; the prime minister with the second longest term in office; the longest serving parliamentarian ever - no one else has influenced modern Jamaica in so many ways.