The COVID-19 lockdown: state against society in Jamaica, Huon Wardle with Laura Obermuller
The Jamaican government has used its ‘Emergency Powers Act’ many times since independence. Recently, bursts of violence, involving attempts by gangs to grasp control of the illegal drug trade on the island, have led to the Act being deployed with increasing frequency. Albeit Jamaica is a two-party parliamentary democracy, state and society in Jamaica have co-existed in varying states of conflict, verging at times on open warfare, ever since the end of colonial rule. In March 2020, the threat of coronavirus led to emergency powers being put to use yet again, this time for a mass societal quarantine exercise. The COVID-19 lockdown, however else it can be described, became a social experiment on a massive scale; one that precipitated—foregrounding in a new way—an enduring gap between what Philip Curtin famously called the ‘two jamaicas’. Curtin argued that the great divide in Nineteenth Century Jamaica was between the mass of now emancipated slaves versus those who owned or had successfully attached themselves to the apparatus of government, including its (English-derived and imposed) systems and values of justice and education. The duality never seemed to resolve itself even after colonial independence in 1962, despite some brief moments of charismatic political leadership. As Jamaican sociologist Derek Gordon put it in the 1980s:
The[…] figures reveal a bleaker reality. They show that those Jamaicans whose parents were agricultural labourers, domestic and unskilled manual workers ha[ve] virtually no chance of ending up at the top of the middle strata (1987:30).
This is not just a story about social mobility, it is a tale about what it means to be a citizen of a post-slave, post-colonial state. The anthropologist Charles Carnegie re-describes Curtin’s divide as one between those who own and control the island transport infrastructure, versus the rest whose primary or sole mode of transportation is walking: ‘walkfoot people’ as he puts it. My friend is one of these ‘walkfoot people’, she is from the unskilled and agricultural background Gordon describes. In her case, though, she has, after years of struggle, finally received her papers. But if we were to trace the family histories of those who now have a Taxpayer Registration Number and those who do not—those who can receive government assistance during the COVID lockdown and those who can’t—would we not be retelling an updated and nuanced version of Curtin’s ‘two Jamaicas’? What would it involve for ‘walkfoot people’ finally to become enfranchised in Jamaica?
Rethinking the Lockdown
Recently, with Laura Obermuller at the University of the West Indies, we have started to design a research on the effects of COVID-19 involving seven communities in the island. We are only at the beginning of this, but we already know that the lockdown has exposed profound social faultlines. Key are those between Jamaicans who can access government help during the crisis due to their formal and banked status versus the undefinable mass of undocumented, unbanked citizens who cannot. So, the kinds of questions we want to ask include: How did undocumented, unbanked Jamaicans survive during the lockdown? What networks and resources were they able to draw on? How did their household situation act to help or to hinder them in accessing resources?
Common sense reflection on conditions in Jamaica should have quickly reflected back that the government’s “Staying Indoors Order” would be profoundly impracticable due to overcrowding. In Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean the family is not synonymous with the house itself, as it is in parts of Euro-America: instead, the family ‘home’ is identified with the larger more socially open space of the ‘yard’, and this goes with an open-ended understanding of what ‘family’ means. The use of the house itself by individuals is inherently complex: for some the house’s use is primarily as a place to sleep, for others there may be activity there throughout the day. The blanket ‘Staying Indoors Order’ would thus inevitably create very different effects, and conflicts, in and for different households with intersecting age, gender and economic dimensions.
The same problems were bound to reappear in the government attempts at amelioration. The Jamaican government made some funding available through its “COVID Allocation of Resources for Employees” (CARE) programme; but accessing this was challenging. For example, the “COVID Compassionate Grant” entails eligible applicants receiving a one-time grant of $10,000 (USD 70) paid to their bank account or a remittance company of their choice for their collection. The applicant needs both a valid Tax Registration Number (TRN) and national identification that matches the TRN. Many Jamaicans do not have updated/accurate documentation. As such, many that needed the funds were disqualified by default. Those without a bank account had to join long queues potentially breaching social distancing guidelines. The Same problems applied to the “COVID-19 Small Business Grant” from the government. Applicants needed to be an active taxpayer with updated business registration. As noted by the Finance Minister in parliament, ‘those who play by the rules win’. But what of those couldn’t ‘play by the rules’ because they weren’t in the game to begin with?
Basic, pragmatic social questions of the kinds we are exploring are bound to become more pressing as this crisis, and the process of recuperation afterwards, unfold. But, below the surface they reveal historically enduring structural features of how Jamaica has been organised over time as a society and as a state. Amongst other aims, our project we will be talking to communities about:
- How did households respond to the lockdown?
- What were the effects of owning or not owning personal documentation during the crisis?
- What kinds of access do people have to banking, what are the barriers to access?
- How have have individuals adapted their livelihood strategies to survive during the COVID-19 government lockdown and curfew?
- Have migrant remittances helped? Have remittances from abroad increased or reduced in response to this crisis?
- What have been some of the community and neighbourly responses to the crisis?