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South Africans have a phrase for it now: the “Stalingrad strategy”

The expression emerged during the long legal and political wars surrounding Jacob Zuma and the era of Gupta-linked state capture. Instead of defeating allegations swiftly on the merits, opponents were exhausted through endless procedural combat: appeals, interlocutory applications, jurisdictional objections, delays, reviews of reviews, and technical manoeuvres designed to ensure that accountability itself became painfully slow.

The objective was not always acquittal.

The objective was attrition.

One delays long enough for witnesses to tire, the public to become confused, institutions to lose momentum, and political realities to shift.

Many Jamaicans still imagine such things happen only in distant places with larger populations and more dramatic politics. But increasingly, one must ask whether Jamaica itself has quietly entered a culture of Stalingrad lawfare.

And if so, why do our courts appear so hesitant to confront it decisively?

This question is not abstract.

It sits at the centre of modern Jamaican governance.

Consider the long-running controversies surrounding the Integrity Commission and Prime Minister Andrew Holness. The Commission raised serious questions regarding statutory declarations, loans, bank accounts, and financial transactions linked to the Prime Minister and associated entities. Whether one believes Holness innocent, careless, unfairly targeted, or improperly scrutinised is almost beside the point.

The deeper issue is institutional velocity.

Why do such matters move so slowly, cautiously, and procedurally in Jamaica whenever high office is involved?

Why does constitutional scrutiny seem to lose urgency precisely where public trust most requires urgency?

Observe the pattern carefully. Sensitive matters become enveloped in technical complexity. Lawyers argue the procedure. Jurisdictional points emerge. Reports are challenged. Disclosure processes expand. Appeals proliferate. Political tribalism hardens. Months become years.

Meanwhile, governance continues uninterrupted.

The machinery of the State rolls forward while accountability crawls behind it carrying bundles of affidavits.

This is exactly what “Stalingrad tactics” achieve.

Again, no one is suggesting that accused persons should lose their legal rights. Constitutional democracies require due process. But due process was never intended to become permanent procedural fog.

Nor was Judicial Review designed merely to admire executive power from a respectful distance.

Yet Jamaica’s courts often appear profoundly reluctant to intervene assertively when politically sensitive concentrations of power are at stake.

Take the explosive Ruel Reid education corruption scandal affair. Jamaicans were told of corruption allegations touching the Ministry of Education, Caribbean Maritime University, contracts, kickbacks, and misuse of public funds. Years later, what remains in the public imagination is less clarity than exhaustion.

The process itself became the punishment — not necessarily for the accused alone, but for public confidence.

Citizens begin forgetting details because the legal machinery moves so slowly that outrage decays faster than adjudication.

Then there is the matter of the Firearm Licensing Authority, where questions repeatedly arise regarding discretion, licensing transparency, fairness, and political connectivity. Yet ordinary Jamaicans often feel practically powerless to challenge opaque administrative decisions. Judicial Review exists theoretically, but for many citizens it remains financially inaccessible, painfully slow, and institutionally intimidating.

That is a dangerous democratic condition.

For Judicial Review is supposed to function as a constitutional emergency brake.

Instead, in Jamaica, it often resembles an overloaded handcart chasing a speeding government convoy uphill through mud.

Part of the problem is cultural. Jamaica remains deeply hierarchical despite our democratic rhetoric. Many citizens still unconsciously treat authority figures as quasi-parental beings whose decisions ought not to be aggressively questioned. Colonial reflexes survive long after colonial flags disappear.

Part of the problem is structural. Jamaica is a very small society where political, commercial, legal, media, and educational elites overlap constantly. The distances between judge, politician, senior counsel, business figure, and regulator are socially narrow.

One need not allege corruption to recognise that small societies naturally develop cultures of caution.

Then there is fear of institutional destabilisation itself.

Many judges in fragile democracies become quietly anxious about appearing “too activist”. They fear accusations of overreach, politicisation, or interference with elected authority. Consequently, courts may drift toward excessive restraint even while executive power grows increasingly muscular.

But restraint and passivity are not the same thing.

Indeed, modern Jamaica increasingly exhibits precisely the conditions under which assertive Judicial Review becomes most necessary:

• expanding executive authority,
• emergency-style legislation,
• weakened public trust,
• concentrated economic power,
• tribal political polarisation,
• and growing perceptions of selective accountability.

Consider recent controversies surrounding proposed legislation like NaRRA. Vast powers touching land use, planning, acquisition, and administrative override were contemplated under the language of resilience and emergency reconstruction. Yet many Jamaicans reasonably asked: where are the constitutional guardrails?

More importantly, if those guardrails fail, will the courts act robustly and promptly enough to matter?

That question now haunts the republic.

Democracies rarely collapse through dramatic coups anymore. Modern democratic erosion is procedural, incremental, lawyered, technocratic, and wrapped carefully in the language of efficiency, resilience, modernisation, and national necessity.

Precisely for that reason, courts must occasionally possess the courage to say a simple constitutional word:

“No.”

Not five years later.

Not after endless procedural trench warfare.

Not after citizens have become exhausted spectators to legal attrition.

But while constitutional injury is still occurring.

Otherwise, Judicial Review risks becoming ceremonial rather than protective — a beautifully worded constitutional ornament observing power long after power has already consolidated itself.

And that is how democracies drift quietly toward the very condition South Africans now warn the world about through one haunting phrase:

The Stalingrad strategy