05/05/2026
COMAND CALLS FOR A SUCCESSOR PROGRAMME THAT PUTS PEOPLE AT THE CENTRE OF DEVELOPMENT
The Community Organizations for Management and Sustainable Development (COMAND) declares that Jamaica must stop treating poor and working people as a problem to be managed and begin recognizing them as a force for nation-building.
For too long, the history of Operation PRIDE has been buried under distortion, bureaucratic fear, and elite discomfort. The truth is far simpler and far more powerful: Operation PRIDE was one of the boldest expressions of people-centred development in modern Jamaica. It recognized that the landless, the poor, and the working class were not waiting helplessly on the State. They were already organizing, already occupying, already building, and already creating communities out of necessity and determination.
The State did not invent that movement. The people did.
Operation PRIDE was meant to give that people’s movement legal structure, developmental support, and legitimacy. The programme’s full meaning must never be forgotten: Programme for Integrated Development, Enterprise. That did not mean charity. It did not mean handouts. It meant land, order, savings, enterprise, self-management, and community power.
At the centre of that model were the Industrial and Provident Societies. These were not token committees. They were the lawful instruments through which communities could hold funds, enter contracts, manage development, and act as organized corporate bodies. In plain language, the people became the developers of their own communities.
And that is where the resistance began.
Because once ordinary Jamaicans became capable of managing land, enforcing compliance, collecting development funds, and directing community growth, a dangerous message was sent to the old order: the poor no longer needed to beg. They no longer needed a political middleman, an overbearing bureaucrat, or a self-appointed expert hovering over every aspect of their advancement. They could act for themselves.
That did not sit well with sections of the bureaucracy and the gatekeeping class.
The enterprise component of Operation PRIDE was never allowed to flourish because too many within the system were uncomfortable with the idea of autonomous, organized, poor communities becoming centres of savings, contracting, production, and wealth creation. The Provident Societies showed real strength. In many cases, they collected more for development than the state agencies. They were better able to monitor compliance. They had more moral authority within the settlements. They were often better positioned to maintain development control than distant offices and paper-based bureaucracies.
Yet instead of strengthening these institutions, the system weakened them.
Instead of oversight, there was encroachment.
Instead of partnership, there was control.
Instead of empowerment, there was suffocation.
Let us be clear: no serious development model can function without fiduciary responsibility, transparency, and accountability. COMAND fully supports strong safeguards in the management of community resources. But safeguards are not the same as seizure. Supervision is not the same as displacement. The proper role of the State was to ensure standards, protect the public interest, and reinforce accountability while leaving real developmental power in the hands of the people.
That is not what happened.
The savings instruments of the Provident Societies were commandeered. Their autonomy was eroded. Their enterprise potential was blocked. What should have become engines of community investment were reduced to dependent appendages of state agencies. Jamaica lost not only a housing programme, but a historic opportunity to build a new model of bottom-up development rooted in self-help, lawful land access, and internal economic circulation.
And still the poor were blamed.
That injustice must end.
Even where there were instances of weak administration or local misapplication, the broad smear campaign against community-based institutions has never been honestly sustained by the record. The Angus Report did not level charges of corruption against the communities as communities. Yet it was the communities that carried the stigma, while the larger system escaped proper scrutiny.
This was never just about land.
It was about power.
It was about who is allowed to control development.
It was about whether poor people could be trusted with responsibility, resources, and the right to shape their own future.
COMAND says the answer must now be yes.
At a time when housing is out of reach for thousands, when informal settlements continue to expand, when landlessness and insecure tenure remain unresolved, and when centralized bureaucracy has plainly failed to produce adequate solutions, Jamaica must move beyond nostalgia and build a successor programme rooted in the best principles of people-centred development.
COMAND therefore calls for a successor national programme that:
Places organized communities at the centre of land, housing, and settlement development.
Recognizes community-based institutions as legitimate partners in planning, implementation, and development control.
Provides legal access to land, tenure security, and infrastructure within a framework of accountability.
Includes savings mobilization, enterprise support, local contracting, and community wealth creation as core pillars.
Ensures strong fiduciary oversight without bureaucratic capture or political suffocation.
Builds sustainable communities not as sites of dependence, but as centres of productivity, dignity, and self-determination.
Jamaica cannot continue to speak about inclusion while denying ordinary people the tools of self-determination. The country cannot solve its housing crisis through delay, control, and contempt for grassroots initiative. And it cannot claim to believe in democracy while refusing to trust the people with the instruments of development.
The lesson of Operation PRIDE is not that the people failed. The lesson is that the people were blocked.
That blockage must be confronted.
A new framework must be built.
And the people must be restored to the centre of development.
Community Organizations for Management and Sustainable Development (COMAND)
Award-winning umbrella organization for best practice in community mobilization, participatory governance, and sustainable development.
