Authored by Lipton Matthews via American Greatness,
Sentiment and economic development are not the same currency, and confusing them costs a small country more than it can afford.
Washington has quietly begun cancelling the visas of prominent Jamaican officials, and the reason is no mystery. American law enforcement partners have grown frustrated with how Kingston handled a cocaine scandal inside its own police force. Operatives cited by the Sunday Gleaner on September 6, 2026, say the revocations “include public officials within the government and the security forces” and that the cancellations amount to a deliberate signal of Washington’s displeasure with the affair.
At the center of that affair sits the now-disbanded Counter Terrorism and Organized Crime division, known as C-TOC. U.S. authorities suspect that police officers assigned to the unit significantly understated the amount of cocaine they confiscated during an operation in Green Island, Hanover, in 2025. An internal audit later turned up two illegal parcels of cocaine sitting inside C-TOC’s own storage facilities, a discovery that triggered the unit’s collapse. Commissioner Kevin Blake transferred more than 40 officers out and effectively dissolved the eleven-year-old division. A police inspector who was attached to C-TOC was arrested and charged after cocaine was allegedly found in his private vehicle, and that arrest is what set the audit in motion. Investigators have since expanded their probe to nearly a dozen high-ranking police and former army personnel, and searches have been carried out at the homes of senior officers once tied to the unit. Whatever the eventual findings, the optics could hardly be worse for a country trying to convince the world it can police its own coastline.
Add to that a second embarrassment, smaller in scale but telling in what it says about institutional discipline. Thousands of Jamaican students failed to show up for this year’s regional CXC examinations, leaving taxpayers facing a bill that could reach several million dollars for mathematics and English papers that were subsidized but never sat. Widen the lens to every subject the government helps fund, and the waste grows larger still. A country running a security deficit and an exam-attendance deficit in the same news cycle is not projecting the image of a nation on the rise.
None of this means Jamaica has stood still. Quite the opposite. Police intelligence now counts fewer than one hundred active gangs, down from a peak of 350 in 2016, a decline the government credits to sustained, intelligence-led operations rather than one-off sweeps. In July, Prime Minister Andrew Holness traveled to San Diego to accept the Esri President’s Award on behalf of the Jamaican government, Esri’s highest honor and one personally selected by the company’s founder. The award recognized Jamaica’s use of geographic information systems to build an integrated national geospatial infrastructure, the same system that helped coordinate the country’s drone and emergency response during Hurricane Melissa. Esri is the dominant name in GIS software and location intelligence worldwide, and having a small island nation singled out among its global user base is a genuine credential, not a participation trophy.
The prime minister understands that reputation is a strategic asset. His government has already engaged an international consulting firm to refresh what he calls Brand Jamaica, hoping to push the country’s image beyond sun, sea and sand toward safety, sustainability, and technological competence. That is the correct instinct. So it is worth asking why, in the same season that Jamaica is trying to sell itself as a serious, forward-looking economy, its government sent a delegation to London to petition King Charles over slavery reparations.
The petition is a frivolous use of a developing country’s time and money. It asks the king, as Jamaica’s head of state, to refer three questions about the transatlantic slave trade to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, the island’s highest court of appeal, in the hope that royal involvement lends weight to a claim that has been dismissed and re-dismissed for over a decade. Culture Minister Olivia Grange, who led the delegation, has called it a milestone moment built on five years of legal groundwork. Five years spent building a case that a man who once sat on the Privy Council itself calls empty. Lord Sumption, the former Supreme Court justice, told the BBC that Jamaica was relying on a Britain that has grown “riven by self-doubt and guilt” and dismissed the entire legal push as, in his words, “a bit of nonsense.” Reading the public commentary that has followed online, much of it agrees with him, and much of it is far less polite. People say Jamaica should focus on its drug problem instead of chasing the Crown for money, or they make the condescending suggestion that the country is too poor to do anything but beg. That is the return on investment this petition has bought: ridicule, not investments.
None of that petitioning does anything to make Jamaica look like a place where an investor should park capital or where a skilled professional should build a career. Sentiment and economic development are not the same currency, and confusing them costs a small country more than it can afford. Consider the alternative use of that same delegation’s time and budget. Imagine a Jamaican mission to London built around studying the city’s technology sector instead, meeting with founders, venture investors, and policymakers who have made Britain’s capital one of Europe’s leading tech hubs. That kind of visit signals ambition rather than grievance. It tells the world Jamaica wants a seat at tomorrow’s table, not compensation for yesterday’s wrongs.
Austria offers a useful model here. It is a considerably wealthier country than Jamaica, yet it still felt the need to station a dedicated tech ambassador in Silicon Valley, first appointed in 2020 under the Open Austria initiative, specifically to build relationships with the frontier companies shaping the next economy. Jamaica has no equivalent presence anywhere near San Francisco or London’s tech corridors. If a country as developed as Austria judges that kind of outreach as essential, a developing nation with Jamaica’s ambitions should judge it as extremely important.
There is precedent for this kind of strategic humility. When Japan sent the Iwakura Mission to Western Europe and North America in the 1870s, its purpose was not to re-litigate old grievances with the powers it had once been forced to deal with on unequal terms. It was to learn, deliberately and systematically, how industrializing nations built their institutions, their industries, and their infrastructure, then bring that knowledge home. The mission helped lay the groundwork for Japan’s transformation into a global industrial power within a generation. Jamaica does not lack the talent or the imagination to attempt something similar. What it currently lacks is the discipline to choose that path over the more emotionally satisfying one.
Sentimental projects carry a real appeal. They offer a sense of moral vindication that a spreadsheet never will. But feeling righteous and being prosperous are not the same achievement, and a country of Jamaica’s size cannot afford to spend its limited diplomatic capital chasing the former while starving the latter. The episode also exposed the practical limitations of the campaign: Jamaican officials spent taxpayer money traveling to London with a formal petition on reparations, yet King Charles declined to meet them. Royal officials indicated that his schedule made a meeting impractical while also stressing that the King does not have the constitutional authority to make a decision on reparations himself. Any such decision would ultimately have to be made by the British government, rather than the monarch.
If the delegation had instead been traveling to London to learn from one of the world’s leading technology hubs and to meet entrepreneurs, investors, and technology companies, the country could at least have come away with something tangible. It could have generated favorable international press, strengthened business relationships, and helped present Jamaica as an emerging technology player. That would fit far more naturally with the brand of Jamaica that the Prime Minister appears to envision, a modern, ambitious, investment-friendly country positioning itself for growth rather than defining its international identity primarily through historical grievance.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 10/02/2026 – 07:20
