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Critically Examining Jamaican and World Politics!Archive for Prime Minister
Jamaica’s Economic Dilemma: Is Education the Answer?
Last week, Prime Minister Bruce Golding made the dreaded announcement, in the middle of the night no less, that public sector workers can expect a cut in their numbers, shortly. While, the PM gave no details as to when the numbers would come down from the approximately ninety thousand or so members of the Civil Service, there is doubt as to whether that delay holds any real hope of a stay of execution of these plans.
Indeed, one of the obvious readings of the PM’s actions in terms of making the announcement, while the nation slept and the fact that it contradicted earlier pronouncements that Civil Servant could rest assured that their numbers would not be cut is that the country is in a deep hole. After all, the remarks were not only made at night, they prefigured, if not confirmed the deep sense of foreboding that now obtains in several areas on account of the impending return to the International Monetary Fund (IMF); and what it will mean in terms of curtailing financial and other freedoms, collectively.
Most critics have complained that there was not only a need for more details about Jamaica’s application but also that the agreement would definitely mean a cut in the Civil Service. Further, the inflation of the budget by as much as $6 billion dollars, following last week’s tabling of the Estimates of Expenditure in the House of Representatives, also means more stress for the regular consumer/ citizen. This is on the heels of a freeze in public sector wages as well as an increase in taxation in several areas, among them Departure Tax, telecommunication, fuel and energy.
The implications are, of course, obvious. More people will be out of work. Less people will have disposable income to spend on the basic necessitities and fewer still will be able to absorb and, therefore, effectively deal with the shocks caused from the fallouts in the system. That means, even darker days ahead for Jamaicans, particularly those accustomed to having a job and providing for their families. The realities are very stark, indeed.
However, the more aware I become of the harsh economic realities as they impact Jamaica, the more I wonder about the types of solutions which are to be used to address this problem. The Prime Minister, for instance, talks of the need for a ‘paradigm shift’. Yet nothing about the return to the IMF or the presentation at midnight, either suggests that there is a change of any real effect that such policies address, or that the policies themselves indicate change.
The current set of economic policies clearly highlight that politicians are still not characters that inspire a great deal of faith and that public policies, themselves, especially as they impact the lives of the ‘common man’ – whoever that is, are still quite onerous in their effects on peoples’ daily lives. The plight of the ‘working poor’ is that, we are doomed to remain that way under the current policies of Government.
This is not to say that some are not able, through frugal management of their finances – however meagre, to eke out some levels of existence beyond mere survival. Still, the implications for ‘regular folk’ is that living from pay cheque to pay cheque is now very much the norm.
In addition to which, the experiences of this kind of poverty also suggests that there is hardly much in the way of hope that can be had by those who must contend with the daily struggles to make ends meet; that is, in terms of seeking real relief from their especially grim realities. The life of the ‘working poor’, pretty much remains the same from the cradle to the grave in Jamaica.
Education the Only Solution!
Which raises the question of education, where there has been reports of several activities; among them, the private schools demand for public funds to sustain their survival. Most recently too, Government announced an impending cut in the fees used to pay which it pays for students for the Caribbean School Education Certificate (CSEC) and the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) subjects, at the end of their five years in secondary school.
Minister of Education, Andrew Holness just last week advised that this is the last year that the fees would be paid as the programme is currently being reviewed to determine the most effective means of addressing the fallouts. Students who do not show up for the exam, after having recieved the benefit of having four of their subjects paid for from the public purse, as well as those who do not do well in the exams can expect little support in ensuing years, as a result.
While, obviously a smart move in terms of reducing the stress on Government’s budget in terms of the returns on the public investment in education; what is not immediately clear is whether there is a recognition that Government will need to reallocate funds to the system in a very targetted and thoughtful way so as to reap the maximum benefits. Government will have to consider investing heavily in providing schools – public as well as private, with the resources to properly educate Jamaica’s children.
Not only should there be an improvement in the quality of students who can recieve the benefit of having their subjects paid for from the public purse; Government should also beef up meal and book programmes with the right resources. Children need a steady diet of the right nurtition for their systems and their minds in order to produce the maximum outputs at the end of their five or seven year stints in the secondary system.
Student/ Teacher Ratio
There is need to reduce the student teacher ratio to levels which will place Jamaica on par with those of our neighbours who do well in the Region, as well as to attain international standards in this regard. We need also to increase classroom spaces; library and computer as well as recreational and sporting facilities. The needs of all children should be addressed as much and as far as is possible within in the limits of the public budget, as well as Government’s own capacities to provide for the total development of its people.
After all, we need to diversify skill sets and, therefore, adequately prepare our youngsters for the rigours of life in the real world when they come of age and will be called on to participate more meaningfully in charting the nation’s future. Additionally, extending the learning hours and revamping the curriculum to include values and attitudes programmes which instill esteem in self and civic pride, are critical.
Practical National Ideology: Education and Development
The goals of national ideology and a keen sense of history are not merely academic interests without any real value in peoples general lives. Far from it! The Jamaican education system needs to become first rate. It should equip the nation’s future with the sense of imagination, occassion and ability to rise to the highest levels possible, whether at home or abroad. This is neither empty or even meaningless rhetoric either.
On the contrary, the need to strongly support education will mean that we may well be educating the whiz finance and labour ministers to help pull us out of the doldrums, currently, and, therefore, achieve and maintain the ambitions of Developed Country status even before 2030. It also means that, problems related to discipline and civic pride as well as an apparent lack of a developed risk taking culture occassioned by the spirit of entrepeneurship might be overcome in the former and deepened and further enhanced in the latter case, in short order.
National development is not just a matter for politicians to be concerned with – whether at nights, or throughout their lives as public servants to the state; rarely ever touching the experiences of the ‘common folk’, with the exception of when their is trouble. Quite the opposite! National development spans the entire gamut of stakeholders, whether the big investor in hotels on Jamaica’s north coast; the mother of two racing through traffic to transport her charges to their various afterschool programmes; to the stuggling cricketer juggling training while holding down a ‘nine-to-five’, to the man pushing his cart to earn a decent, if not difficult, living in Coronation Market. All are invested!
Greater efforts will and must be made to include each individual in the national conversation about the search for real solutions. Perhaps it is the case that, the mother fasting and praying that her son gets off the street and take to his books, or the deejay travelling to glitzy metropolitan centres also have ideas about how to push Jamaica forward. What can be done to harness their insights into transforming our collective vision of self and saving us from financial ruin?
National Anthem
Is it enough to just stand at attention at the cinema and other public functions when we hear the National Anthem and not also see how that act of genuflection registers an abiding committment to helping Jamaica to grow? We have to push education in a way that we have never done before and we will have to talk straight with the Jamaican people! It is just that simple!
More of us have ideas as to how to start businesses and improve on our situations. What is being done to enable these sectors in a real way? Is it enough to just say that we need a change or is it the case that we also need to articulate, very carefully, what that change is and how we will get there and when? Where are the timetables and the considerations for policy? How will we make that impact peoples’ lives positively and meaningfully?
Until we begin the conversation around these questions and not just talk but also act on them, there is little in the way of faith that midnight speeches inspire, or even criticisms from the other side. Opposition must have a moral fibre and integrity that are beyond question, even inasmuch as they remain political. Narrow partisanship will never save a people that had the courage and the audacity to survive five hundred years of oppression.
Creative; Honest Solutions Needed
On the contrary, our service to Jamaica requires creative, honest and inspired leadership that speaks not in parables and veiled statements but with respect, insight and commitment of purpose. This has to be one of those moments in history where we rise up to our greater selves. It has to become a watershed experience that benchmarks our severance with the past but also our embrace of the solution oriented possibilities of the future, defined by real earmarks and a consideration of all the stakeholders in ensuring appropriate governance.
Our work is, indeed, cut out for us! Let’s see how much of it we can get to before the next generation comes a-calling for their own stake in the process!
Jamaica’s Mandatory Wage Freeze and the Global Recession: Was this the Best Government Could Offer?
Below is a post I made on my Face Book page which has generated alot of buzz in that forum. I thought that it would be useful to publish it here, as well in an effort to get the views of an alternate audience. It’s sole intent is to widen the extent of the dialogue about Jamaica’s economic outlook, arising from changes in the world economy which has been on a consistent trend downwards for some time now.
How will Jamaica deal with the fallouts from the ‘Global Financial Crisis/ Meltdown’? These initial views hope to start that conversation, at the very least add another position for consideration.
Jamaica, like several other countries across the world, is feeling the dire effects of the contraction of the world economy and the collapse of the international credit industry, otherwise referred to as the ‘Banking Crisis’. Clearly, global in its scope and destructive in its reach, there is no denying that everyone across the world has come in for some sort of recessionary impact, as a result.
In its own efforts to respond to the crisis, the Jamaican Government has recommended a mandatory wage freeze for the Jamaican Public Sector, after the Prime Minister announced that he was also undertaking to give himself and, presumably, his other ministers of government, a fifteen percent cut in their wages. It is worth noting that, the Prime Minister’s salary comes up to well over half a million Jamaican dollars per month which, therefore, means that a fifteen percent salary cut does not go quite as far as those who have had to endure the erosion of the value of their wages over time, due to inflation, as well as the forced wage freeze.
In further justifying his position, one which was not discussed with either the Service or the unions who represent them, the Prime Minister claimed that to give the now due seven percent increase in wages, under the most recent Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in 2008, that he would have to let go in excess of twenty thousand members of the Service. Government is the biggest employer in Jamaica, with just under ninety thousand employees at various levels in the system. The planned letting go of nearly a fifth of the Service population became the benchmark against which the Prime Minister made his decision.
While, not decrying the PM’s right to make hard choices, nor necessarily diminishing the basis on which he must do so, especially those concerning Jamaica’s economic future, there is need nonetheless to interrogate the current tone of Jamaica’s political leadership. Notwithstanding what many have routinely claimed is ‘too large’ a Public Sector, it behooves us to also ask whether this is the likely, or even best solution?
Indeed, the questioning of the decision made by the PM, which also directly impacts me, has more to do with the style of governance as well as the spirit than with the decision, itself. Hardly a useful distinction, it nonetheless points to the fact that, if we can employ better decision-making processes then it is more likely that, we can arrive at better outcomes, presumably in the interests of all.
Election Promises
Before coming to power in 2007, the then Leader of the Opposition Bruce Golding and his Party made various promises; among them, an assurance that the economy would grow by as much as seven percent, not unlike that of Singapore and other countries on the fast track to development. Other claims made included the very emotive charge that, while we may not all get rich we certainly did not have to be as poor as were, under the previous administration, in particular under then Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller.
We could not, in effect, afford to take a chance with Mrs. Simpson Miller, the virago, who cares little, if anything for the members of her own constituency. That is, given its then extreme state of disarray. With the upsurge of emotions evoked by that experience, that we must now concede to a mandatory wage freeze is especially curious, if not altogether very distressing.
In addition to a tax on books, salt and other sundry items, the vast majority of which were previously not taxed and which also form a regular part of peoples’ daily existence here, does the make point of an apparently unconcerned and uncaring administration. What of the claims about empowerment? Is there any truth to any of them, especially in a context where there is no discussion and no seeming regard for the fact that people are obviously not coping well with the fallouts from the contracting world economy?
Economic Recession
At the risk also of dwelling too much on the bad, it was also this same administration who, when the rest of the Developed World were assembling their various economic crisis response teams claimed that Jamaica is fine and would not be seriously affected (presumably, if at all!). That attitude we now know was also wrong, as much as the apparent lack of regard for the electorate, insofar as refusing to address the nation directly to update us on the status of the economic plans in the current crisis.
To say that we are starved of information, however, would not altogether reflect an accurate position. This is especially in a context where there are enough alternate information sources coming from various points which paint just how serious a crisis we are in, globally. Still, the refusal to engage with Jamaicans on a direct, face-to-face manner is telling insofar as it not only gives the impression that ‘nutten naw gwaan’, it also reinforces this deep-seated pessimism. Needless to remind that, that and a recession are a deadly concoction when combined together.
Lack of Proper Planning/ Gas Tax
The lack of a visible or even meaningful plan, with of course the exception of the budget whose reading over a week ago seemed to have coincided with flashbacks from a couple years before when the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), the Party currently in power effectively capitalised on the widespread disenchantment of Jamaicans at the time, at the news of a gas tax. Several days of rioting and media campaigns against the then Government – the People’s National Party (PNP), now members of Opposition, forced what appeared to be an about face. The tax was eventually rolled back.
Ironically, gas is now being taxed and despite concerns or even voiced opposition to this move, there does not appear to be the space for that kind of concession by the new administration. This after assuring rather glibly, as noted above, early on in the Recession last year, that Jamaica would not likely be adversely impacted by the crisis.
There was, as expected, a torrent of criticisms with which the Minister of Finance and the Public Service Audley Shaw’s remarks were addressed. However, that storm soon passed. And we were back to ‘business as usual’. After all, the popular position in some media here is that, there could at least be tolerance, on some level, given how badly the economy was felt to be mismanaged by the previous administration.
Alternate Strategy: Mass Lay-offs?
I am no economic whiz and I can clearly see the value of having a job. However, if mass firings and layoffs are the appropriate course of action, as is suggested by one of the comments on my mood status (on Face Book) shortly after posting, then it seems to me that there is a real need for more brain power to be added to the Government’s economic advisory team than is currently available. It is hardly a viable option, which is not to say it could not happen. Still, it does not justify non-communication and or the evident lack of regard so clearly and contemptuously demonstrated by the apparent lack of any type of coherent or even meaningful plan to drive the economy and limit our dependency on Government to provide employment for the majority of Jamaicans.
Taxation of Basic and Educational Supplies
The seeming lack of concern for a trained and or educated work force, across the length and breadth of the country is also exemplified in the move to tax certain books and other basic supplies, as per the new budget tabled by Mr. Shaw. We can be certain that, by these actions this administration sees little or no value in even attempting to communicate confidence in their abilities and their preparedness to do the job at hand – that is, governing in difficult times. This is especially sad, considering just how much we stand to loose in an increasingly worsening world economy.
The drying up of assistance programmes and funds, as well as competitive loans, will mean further erosion in the value of life here. Those at the base of the structure will obviously feel the effects most readily, but you can rest assured that others will too and none of this augurs well for the crime and violence that we continue to grapple with daily, with little or no success. What too of work to rule and industrial action? How will people respond to freeze on their income with no, apparent, end in sight?
These are interesting and timely questions which require urgent responses.
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