Scores of individuals whose families have been devastated, financially, emotionally, and socially, by the preventable meltdown of Jamaica’s financial sector in the 1990s, have contacted me since The Agenda piece two Sundays ago, headlined ‘Details of a national tragedy… and the cat’s pajamas’.

Five things are crystal clear from the e-mail and phone correspondence that I have received to date. First, the financial crash of the 90s has resulted in generational setbacks for hundreds of Jamaicans. Second, the handful of people whose actions precipitated the debacle have suffered the least detrimental effects. In fact, their incompetence has been massively rewarded. Third, Deacon Ronald Thwaites, former Member of Parliament (MP) for Kingston Central and former education minister was spot on when he said, “the PNP has presided over the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since slavery”. Rural folks, in their philosophical brilliance, warn that, “When fish come from the river bottom and tell you that crocodile down there, believe him.” Fourth, the financial wreck of the 90s forced dozens of our best people to flee our shores.

MOST STRIKING

“It was a case of the dog that caught the car.” A Finsac’d entrepreneur at the end of a very lengthy e-mail submitted that this idiom explains why the financial fiasco in the 90s happened. It got me thinking. I concluded that he was absolutely correct.

Now, before intellectual contortionists start to bellow that I am describing people in and/or affiliated with the People’s National Party (PNP) as dogs, let me make it abundantly clear that an idiom is a phrase or expression that largely or exclusively carries a figurative or non-literal meaning. ‘The dog that caught the car’ is often used as a metaphor to describe a situation in which someone pursues power with great determination, but once they achieve it they find themselves unprepared or unsure of what to do next. The mentioned idiom is based on the strange habit that some dogs have of chasing cars that are passing by on a nearby road.

How does this idiom apply to the national financial tragedy of the 90s? Well, recall that in the run-up to the February 1989 General Election, then Opposition leader and PNP President Michael Manley had discarded his Kariba suit. He replaced it with the Western-style jacket and tie. Accompanying the disposing of his Kariba suit was the throw-out of democratic socialism.

“Democratic socialism is dead,” was the unambiguous declaration of socialism’s premier local lieutenant at a meeting of the PNP’s National Executive Council that was held at The University of the West Indies, Mona, in the early 1990s. Manley also publicly rejected democratic socialism in Washington, DC, soon after he was sworn in as prime minister for a third time in February 1989. The political scales had fallen from his eyes.

Ironically, three and half decades later, Mark Golding, president of the PNP and leader of the Opposition, has disregarded Manley’s good counsel. I said here several times prior that Golding and the PNP represent an unusable past which cannot help this country to advance in the types of ways which will cause Jamaica to develop faster. Jamaica needs to become a high-growth, high-tech, high-wage economy. This is something alien to the PNP.

It bears repeating, there are only two periods in our history when Jamaica achieved meaningful economic growth. Those were in the 1960s and a portion of the 1980s. Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) administrations had the keys to Jamaica House during both periods.

The PNP has demonstrated an indisputable incapacity to grow the economy of this country in a meaningful manner during all the times at the helm. Economic growth is not the forte of socialist parties like the PNP. Socialist parties are good at taxation, borrowing, the proliferation of the money illusion, and the pernicious tomfoolery of redistribution in the absence of prior creation and production.

Unsurprisingly, there is not a single successful socialist country in the world. And please do not come with the examples of the Scandinavian countries. They are not socialist. I previously discussed why with copious evidence here. Socialism has not worked anywhere in the world, because it cannot work. Socialism is alien to the very nature of human beings. Yet Mark Golding has declared that he is a socialist. This is a harbinger.

THEY WERE WARNED

So how does all this tie-in with the mentioned idiom? When Manley returned to power in 1989 he promised strict adherence to free market economics. The PNP’s Achilles heel was it did not understand free market policies. It still doesn’t.

Anyway, the PNP fought tooth and nail to get the Edward Seaga-led JLP Administration out of power in the run-up to the February 1989 General Election. Recall the many street demonstrations, the strikes by unions with heavy infiltration of PNP actors in leadership, and the vicious and racist campaign of demonisation of Prime Minister Edward Seaga.

The raison d’être of a political party is the acquisition and retention of State power. I get that. But retention and/or acquisition of State power cannot mean that all available tactics, strategies, or methods for attaining of achieving desired ends are justifiable, as some in the PNP espouse. Recall, PNP Chairman now emeritus Robert Pickersgill said: “We believe that it is best for the PNP to form the Government; therefore, anything that will lead or cause us to be in power is best for the PNP and best for the country.” This putrid belief is riveted in the braggadocio claim that, “Jamaica is PNP country.”

This invincibility complex, doubtless, figured prominently in the financial debacle of the 90s.

At the time of Manley’s return to Jamaica House in 1989, privatisation and liberalisation — made popular globally by then president of the United States of America Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister of the United Kingdom — were sold as the panacea to all the world’s problems. Regulations in general, and government regulations in particular, were branded as the greatest obstacles to growth and development. Recall, Reagan in his inaugural address in 1981, famously quipped: “In this present crisis, Government is not the solution to our problem; Government is the problem.” Ironically, while Reagan and Thatcher prescribed neo-liberalism — market-oriented reform policies such as “eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers” and reducing, especially through privatisation and austerity, State influence in the economy — as the global economic silver bullet, they simultaneously employed vast layers of protection to preserve the integrity of especially their home economies.

Manley, quite likely to impress Washington, DC, abandoned the reins of prudent government regulations, which his predecessor Edward Seaga had retained, despite strenuous disagreements with Washington, DC. Some in the PNP, who were rabid votaries of socialism in the 70s and 80s, started to preach neo-liberal economics as our salvation. It was a classic irony. Stone-cold socialists were mouthing and implementing neoliberal policies. I believe that starting with Manley’s return in ‘89 and P J Patterson’s arrival in March 1992, Jamaica, effectively, became more neo-liberal than the economist Milton Friedman. It was a tragic descent.

I expect some are going to shout: “Higgins, hindsight is 20/20 vision.” That howl does not accord with facts. Manley and later Patterson were warned repeatedly that they were heading down a course that would result in near economic catastrophe. Seaga warned the Administration many times in Parliament. Wilmot “Motty” Perkins, journalist extraordinaire, alerted them numerous times on radio. Basil Buck, financial analyst, begged the PNP to abandon its folly. It is absolutely false that the PNP was not strenuously warned.

When Dr Omar Davies became finance and planning minister in 1993 he quickened the plunge over the precipice by, among other things, feeding steroids to the iniquitous high interest policy. I recall Perkins saying on radio several times that, “Jamaica was sapping up liquidity in Japan and other far-away places.” Basil Buck, former financial editor of
The Gleaner, warned of the precipitous trajectory of Davies’ high interest rates. Talk radio callers, who were labelled as unlettered, admonished the PNP to urgently change course. It did not.

Davies, the PNP said, was brought in to steady the ship. He sank it. The painful emotional, social, and financial pangs are still being felt by hundreds of Jamaicans today, here and abroad. Jamaica’s black entrepreneurial class was almost decimated. The tragic mistakes of the 90s set us back some 30 years. It would be suicidal to re-embrace the decrepit thinking, which almost destroyed Jamaica.

PNP still doesn’t get it

Like the PNP did in the 90s, the PNP says it is a convert of free market economics. But, at the same time, Mark Golding says he is a devout socialist. How does that work?

Recently, Opposition spokesperson on finance Julian Robinson urged new Minister of Finance and Public Service Fayal Williams to focus on economic growth. Robinson is right.

Any objective assessment will show that Jamaica’s macro-economic indicators are in the best shape since we started keeping those records. We have a stable dollar, capital flight is a thing of the past, our net international reverses (NIR) are over US$5 billion, employment at 4.20 per cent is the lowest in 50 years, inflation is steady at just below 6 per cent, crime in particular murder is trending down, Jamaica’s international credit rating is the best in 50 years, foreign exchange is readily available, and I could go on. So Robinson is right.

It is time for meaningful economic growth. The Andrew Holness-led Administration has laid out a clear road map to grow the economy. It is called modernisation of all Jamaica’s operations. I discussed it here previously.

There is no road map from the PNP. Why? I believe the answer is simple. The PNP is good at talking the talk, but not walking the walk. It talked a lot in the 90s. I contend we must not be tricked again.

The PNP says it has changed. I don’t believe it. How can the party be seen as credible when Mark Golding has promised a new heaven and new Earth but has yet to indicate how they will be paid for? I have seen this movie before and the ending was traumatic.

With less than a year to go before our 19th parliamentary election the PNP needs to, among other things, answer the following questions:

1) Where are the PNP’s new and/or better ideas to grow the Jamaican economy, faster?

2) Where are the PNP’s new and/or better ideas to remedy the choking issue of major crimes, and murder in particular?

The country needs answers that show how the PNP’s ideas/programmes will be credibly funded and operationalised. Anything else is mere hot air.

GENERATIONAL CONSEQUENCES

The outcome of the next general election will have generational consequences for all Jamaicans. Those who behaved like the proverbial dog that caught the car when they were at Jamaica House cannot be trusted with our future. The crystal clear choice is between an unusable past and the continued modernisation of Jamaica’s roads, hospitals, courts, education system, markets, security services, public sanitary services, civil services, social services, human rights protection, Internet infrastructure, port and shipping facilities, etc. Jamaica’s present modernisation trajectory will come to a screeching and terrible halt if the present macro-economic gains are destroyed — as they were in the 70s and 90s. As I see it, Mark Golding and Julian Robinson do not understand that there are no strong countries with weak economies, and there are no weak countries with strong economies.

Former Prime Minister P J Patterson (left) has a word with former Prime Minister Edward Seaga in Parliament on March 28, 2006 when the House had a special stting to bid farewell to Patterson after his 30 years of political service.

Former president of the United States of America Ronald Reagan

Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister of the United Kingdom.

Omar Davies

Wilmot “Motty” Perkins

PNP spokesman on finance Julian Robinson Garfield Robinson

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Michael Manley , former prime minister of Jamaica

Garfield Higgins

Garfield Higgins is an educator, journalist and a senior advisor to the minister of education and youth. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or higgins160@yahoo.com.