It may now have come from a new source with a potentially louder voice, but the warning that the Jamaican state is in danger of being captured by special interests with malintent is not new.

Several years ago, Edward Seaga, the then leader of the Jamaica Labour Party, raised the spectre of "tainted money" being used to influence his party's internal elections and the possibility of this corruption burrowing deeper into the national polity.

When Dr Peter Phillips was national security minister, he cited fears of narco-terrorists being able to bribe their way to power and control of a weak and endemically corrupt state. Others have voiced similar concerns.

These dangers, as the recent Transparency International report on Jamaican corruption suggested, are far greater today than even, say, a half a decade ago. Indeed, the potential, if we do not take stock and urgently reverse this trend, is not merely of special interests being content to operate from the shadows, manipulating policy to their benefit.

Rather, we risk them openly flaunting their control, leading to the eventual collapse of the formal Jamaican state and the country being branded with rogue status. Somalia offers an example of what is possible.

Political exclusion

There is already collusion between Jamaican political parties and the enforcers and criminals who help them to maintain their zones of political exclusion, the so-called garrison communities.

Moreover, Jamaicans are deeply involved in the global narcotics trade, using the country as a critical trans-shipment point for drugs from South America heading for North America and Europe. The drug trade has helped to fuel gang violence, which contributes significantly to the over 1,600 homicides here annually, among the world's highest. Our police force is largely ineffective and corrupt and our justice system is inefficient.

Jamaica itself 'exports' criminal gangsters to other countries, as was highlighted recently with actions in Costa Rica to curb the behaviour of Jamaican gangs there.

Couldn't guarantee security

But perhaps more problematic is that significant sections of the country, from a security point of view, are not under the effective control of the Jamaican state. Indeed, the Jamaican Government has stalled in extraditing an accused drug smuggler and gunrunner to the United States because, most people believe, he is close to the governing party and a fear that the state could not guarantee security in his area of control if he is forcibly removed.

Among the accepted characteristics of rogue states are their implementation and execution of policies that are outside international norms and principles, and their lack of respect for the attitudes of other nations.

Jamaica is clearly not in those leagues, but management inertia and a failure of political leadership chip away at the foundation of the Jamaican state, already threatening its legitimacy. Should we fail to act decisively now, there is a clear and present danger that the state will collapse and be captured by those ready to make it rogue.

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