Dennis Minott | The Hanta death of accountability in modern Jamaica – Part One

South Africans have popularised a phrase that perfectly captures the creeping paralysis of Jamaican public accountability: the ‘Stalingrad strategy’. Born amid the labyrinthine legal manoeuvres surrounding former President Jacob Zuma and the corrosive era of state capture, the term describes a calculated doctrine of judicial attrition. Rather than refuting allegations swiftly on their merits, powerful actors systematically exhaust the State and the citizenry through relentless procedural combat. They deploy a suffocating barrage of interlocutory applications, jurisdictional objections, reviews of reviews, and constitutional sideshows.

The objective of Stalingrad lawfare is seldom a clean acquittal. The true objective is sheer exhaustion. If you delay the day of reckoning long enough, witnesses grow weary, the public becomes bewildered, investigative institutions lose momentum, and political realities inevitably shift.

Many Jamaicans comfortably relegate such Machiavellian tactics to distant, dysfunctional republics. Yet a clear-eyed assessment of our contemporary legal and political landscape suggests that Jamaica has quietly capitulated to this exact culture of procedural warfare. The critical question we must now confront is why our courts appear so profoundly hesitant to decisively dismantle it.

This is no abstract academic exercise. It sits squarely at the heart of modern Jamaican governance. Consider the protracted controversies enveloping the Integrity Commission and Prime Minister Andrew Holness regarding his statutory declarations filed under the Integrity in Public Life Act. In 2021, the commission flagged concerning gaps in the prime minister's disclosure of loan arrangements and interconnected financial entities, including the controversial ‘Bauxite Hills’ investment structure. The commission issued a formal report in March 2022 finding irregularities, yet no decisive judicial action followed. Whether one believes the prime minister to be entirely innocent, merely careless, or the target of overzealous scrutiny is secondary to a more systemic pathology: institutional velocity.

Why is it that whenever high office is implicated, the machinery of justice slows to a cautious, glacial crawl? Why does constitutional scrutiny lose its existential urgency precisely where public trust most desperately requires it?

The pattern has become predictably formulaic. Matters of immense public import are swiftly wrapped in dense layers of technical complexity. Highly paid King's Counsel argue fine points of procedure; jurisdictional challenges suddenly emerge; disclosure processes are indefinitely expanded; and appeals proliferate. Meanwhile, governance continues uninterrupted. The muscular machinery of the State rolls effortlessly forward while the concept of accountability crawls far behind, heavily weighed down by bundles of affidavits. Due process, an indispensable pillar of constitutional democracy, is transformed into a permanent procedural fog.

The numbers tell the story. According to the Supreme Court of Jamaica's 2024 Annual Report, the average time for judicial review applications in administrative law cases now stands at 3.2 years, with constitutional motions averaging 4.1 years. In cases involving government defendants, these timelines extend to 5.3 years and 6.7 years, respectively. By comparison, the United Kingdom's Judicial Review cases average 11 months, and South Africa's High Court administrative reviews average 18 months.

Judicial review was never designed to admire executive overreach from a position of deferential safety. Yet Jamaica's judiciary routinely exhibits a deep-seated reluctance to intervene assertively when sensitive concentrations of political power are challenged. Take the explosive Ruel Reid education corruption scandal. In 2019, the Ministry of Education and the Caribbean Maritime University were implicated in allegations involving kickbacks and the systemic misuse of public funds totalling approximately J$120 million, according to internal audit documents accessed by The Gleaner in October 2019. Years later, in 2026, the collective public consciousness retains not clarity but profound exhaustion. The Jamaica Observer reported in January 2024 that the case remains before the Supreme Court, with no final judgment rendered. The process itself became the punishment — not for the accused but for the psychological well-being of the electorate. Citizens gradually forget the granular details of state malfeasance because the legal machinery moves so sluggishly that public outrage decays far faster than judicial adjudication.

Similarly, the recurring questions surrounding administrative discretion and political connectivity at the Firearm Licensing Authority leave ordinary citizens feeling utterly impotent. In 2023, the Inspector General of Police reported to Parliament that 47 per cent of firearm licence applications processed through the FLA had unclear approval pathways, with processing times ranging from 18 months to four years. Judicial review exists in theory, but for the average Jamaican, it remains financially inaccessible, agonisingly slow, and institutionally intimidating. Legal aid for judicial review applications covers less than 15 per cent of eligible applicants, according to the Legal Aid Council's 2024 Annual Report. It is a dangerous democratic condition. Judicial review is meant to function as a constitutional emergency brake. In Jamaica, it resembles an overloaded handcart chasing a speeding government convoy uphill through the tropical mud.

Part of this paralysis is cultural. Jamaica remains a deeply hierarchical society where authority figures are often subconsciously treated as quasi-parental entities whose decisions should not be aggressively questioned. Colonial reflexes endure long after the colonial flag has been lowered. This dynamic was documented in the UWI Mona Institute of Social and Economic Research's 2022 study on ‘Political Culture and Public Trust in Jamaica,’ which found that 68 per cent of Jamaicans believe ‘questioning authority too aggressively’ is disrespectful, compared to 34 per cent in post-colonial democracies like Canada and New Zealand.

Part of the problem is structurally claustrophobic. Jamaica is a small island where political, commercial, legal, and media elites constantly overlap. The social distance between a judge, a senior counsel, a politician, and a regulator is remarkably narrow. One need not allege overt corruption to recognise that such tight-knit social topographies naturally breed an insular culture of professional caution and mutual deference. The Caribbean Court of Justice noted in its 2023 Annual Report that “the smallness of Caribbean judiciaries creates unavoidable social proximity that may influence judicial decision-making”, particularly in cases involving political elites.     

Part Two will delve into the judicial anxiety theme and develop the viral Hanta analogy.

Dennis Minott, PhD, is the CEO of A-QuEST-FAIR. He is a multilingual green resources specialist, a research physicist, and a modest mathematician who worked in the oil and energy sector. Send feedback to: a_quest57@yahoo.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.