Politics & Power Quote by Ziggy Marley

Ziggy Marley is doing something reggae has always done best: stripping the sheen off “democracy” and pointing to the cash register behind it. The line lands because it refuses the polite fiction that politics is primarily a moral project. Instead, it frames the system as an engine with priorities baked in: growth first, people later. That blunt hierarchy is the subtext. He’s not describing a bug in governance; he’s naming what he sees as the operating system.

The phrasing matters. “Not for the people” is deliberately absolute, a provocation that dares you to argue from lived outcomes rather than civic ideals. “Secondary to the economy” sounds almost bureaucratic, as if human needs have been demoted in a quarterly meeting. Then he sharpens it into a street-level metric: “what generates money.” The economy here isn’t a neutral scoreboard; it’s a set of incentives that rewards extraction, lobbying, and short-term profit while treating public wellbeing as a cost center.

Context does a lot of work. As the son of Bob Marley, Ziggy speaks from a lineage where music doubles as social reporting, shaped by postcolonial realities and the long reach of global capital. Read in a 21st-century frame, it also echoes the post-2008 mood: bailouts, austerity, and the feeling that policy responds faster to markets than to misery. The intent isn’t cynicism for its own sake; it’s a demand to re-rank values, to ask who “the economy” is actually for when people keep getting priced out of their own lives.