LATEST NEWS:
Letters
They won't come back home
Monday, November 02, 2009
Dear Editor,
I wonder if those of us who still eke out a living realise that there are thousands of us living outside our shores who would love to come back home but have decided that their lives are not worth the risk, so they stay away with no place to go.
There was a time when Jamaicans living in the United States were referrred to as "Jewmaicans" because of their penchant for hard work and thriftiness, but this nickname could very well turn out to be fateful because, like the Jews who had nowhere to go, these people might have to be looking to establish a state of their own.
The mass migration in the 1970s and the early 1980s separated friends and families and the policies of the government of the 90s brought the middle class to their knees. This leads one to ask whether we did the right thing in 1989 when we voted back the PNP into government .
Most people now firmly believe that if Mr Seaga had been given the opportunity to continue, this country would have been at least 10 times better off today, because he understood very well what the devaluation of the Jamaican dollar would have done to the lives of the people.
When the PNP started the massive devaluation of the dollar, at one stage in 2003 it moved from US$1 = $50 to US$1 = $70. We were told by the then minister of finance that in order to stop the run on the dollar interest rates had to be increased. This he did which led to interest rates climbing to unprecedented levels, at one stage over 100 per cent on overdrafts, and today our dollar has fallen to almost $90 = US$1.
How can a country which imports almost everything and exports almost nothing continue to exist under these conditions?
If this government fails, Jamaica may very well reach the stage of being classified as a failed state.
Ken Spencer
PO Box 537
Kingston 8
RSS Feeds