Impeachment, the CCJ, gunmakers responsibility, mental health, fixing the efficiency of the justice system, COVID-19 woes, and maintaining heritage sites were just some of the important topics The Gleaner weighed in on this week. But just as important as all these, is the organisation’s look at the integrity of the National Honour and Awards process and highlighting the importance of the work done by the father of US vice-president, Kamala Harris. The opinion seeks to disabuse the country of the suggestion that his familial association with the US VP has anything to do with a much-deserved Order of Merit.

Don Harris does not need vicarious existence

TWO THINGS have characterised Don Harris’ public approach to American politics over the many years of his daughter Kamala’s rise to prominence in it. He has mostly held his piece about US politics, and he clearly has no wish to live vicariously through the exploits of Kamala Harris, the US vice president.

But Don Harris has no need to. He possesses a formidable résumé as an academic and economist, as well as for his work advising global institutions and governments, including Jamaica’s, on policies to kick-start, and sustain, economic development and growth. We would not be surprised, therefore, if Professor Harris is more than a bit peeved at the seeming public conflation of his award of the Order of Merit by Jamaica with his daughter’s position as Joe Biden’s deputy.

It would be almost impossible, of course, for there not to have been a certain amount of conjoining of the father of the American vice-president and his receipt of Jamaica’s second-highest national honour after the designation of national hero (after discounting the Order of the Nation, which is reserved for governors general and prime ministers) for which the recipient has to have a real, and provable, body of work. Put another way, there would be no good time for Professor Harris to have received this honour – unless it was before Ms Harris’ ascendancy or after she left office – without cynics questioning why he was being acknowledged and what Jamaica hopes to get out of it. With respect to the timing, postponing the award would be impractical, if the idea is to honour Professor Harris during his active lifetime. He, after all, will turn 83 in a fortnight.

INTELLECTUAL PROWESS

There is another significant reason why most Jamaicans will see Donald Harris only through the prism of his daughter’s achievement, and why other people like him, at home and in the diaspora, do not often resonate with the majority of Jamaicans. We have not as yet figured out a way to lionise people whose accolades flow directly from their intellectual prowess and pursuits, similar to how we celebrate and extol our athletes and entertainers and even, sometimes, politicians. This is a matter that should be worked on – as a deliberate project of the Government and civil society institutions.

This suggestion is not because we believe Jamaica’s sportsmen, artists and entertainers are undeserving of great accolades. That, on the evidence of the genius of many in this group, would be fatuous. Rather, we are for the recognition of all of our especially talented people, appreciating that the output of academic intellect will be crucial if Jamaica is to build a competitive 21st-century economy.

With respect to the latter point, Don Harris fits the profile and is a worthy entrant to the society of the Order of the Merit, which is open to people who have achieved “eminent international distinction in the field of science, the arts, literature or any other endeavour”. No more than two persons can be conferred with this honour in any year, and no more than 15 members of the order can be alive at any time.

PROUD JAMAICAN

Jamaican citizenship is not a specific criterion for induction into this order. Don Harris, now retired as a professor at the prestigious Stanford University, is, nonetheless, a Jamaican who proudly acknowledges his heritage and the values instilled in him during his childhood in Brown’s Town, St Ann. And he has given back to Jamaica directly.

Professor Harris was engaged in the social-economic development debates of the late ‘60s and 1970s in the Caribbean, United States and elsewhere. In 1995, working with the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), during the P.J. Patterson administration, he authored An Approach to Industrial Policy for Jamaica, essentially a guide to why, and how, Jamaica should go about building an export-led economy. That project faltered on the policy and political distractions of the time.

In 2010-11, during Bruce Golding’s administration, Professor Harris was back at the PIOJ, designing, with the agency’s then-executive director, Gladstone Hutchinson, A Growth Inducement Strategy for the island, elements of which found their way into subsequent economic policy. Unfortunately, neither of these documents was ever implemented as a programmatic whole. Yet, much of what Professor Harris articulated, especially that relating to an export-led growth strategy, remains, we believe, as relevant today as a quarter-century ago.

As part of the honouring of Professor Harris, but more so for itself, Jamaica should review and update the document on industrial policy, and in a process that breaks the incongruous conflation of his scholarship and the fact that he fathered the vice-president of the United States. 

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