- TASHEIKA MAIR/FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER
Despite the huge real increase in educational expenditure (over six per cent of GDP) Jamaica's performance in CXC English and math is below that of every single country in the English-speaking Caribbean, except Grenada and Guyana.
Don Robotham, Contributor
AS EDWARD Seaga has accurately pointed out, in the recent Budget Debate Audley Shaw embraced Dr. Omar Davies' economic model. It is hilarious to hear Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) sympathisers criticising Dr. Davies and apparently failing to understand the policy U-turn of their own leadership.
A comedy worthy of the talents of Oliver and the best roots plays! But they have lost the plot. They should ask Mr. Seaga to gently explain it to them.
This applies in particular to the scores of 'bright young minds' and not-so-bright old minds suddenly vying to enter or re-enter representational politics.
On both the People's National Party and JLP sides, these persons, young and old, are driven by the purest Jamaican opportunism or nostalgia for a past which exists only in their overheated imaginations. They have not thought for five minutes about the problems of the country.
If you were to ask them, for example, what they would do to improve our health services, they would greet you with a blank uncomprehending glare. You might even get a 'badwud' for your trouble if you persisted.
These young and old 'waggonists' do not even understand the macroeconomic policies adopted by their own leadership. They think solely in terms of personalities - their personality!
The PNP ones dream of returning to the glory days of the 1970s. The JLP ones swallow, without chewing, the myth of the happy 1980s. Serious indigestion and worse await them and the country. It's a cruel world out there which has no patience with a tiny underdeveloped country full of naïve politicians with oversize egos.
Neither the PNP nor the JLP has devoted any time to examining and critiquing their policies of a previous era. Neither party has any serious internal policy-making capacity. The old and new opportunists simply see that they can capitalise on social discontent to further personal ambition. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity which the waggonists are determined to grab before it passes. After all, it may never come back again.
UNCOMPETITIVENESS
But, the waggonists cannot help us with our real problems. Our problem is the across-the-board uncompetitiveness of the Jamaican economy and the low value-added of our output in a globalised world economy. If you put these waggonists in power on Monday, this same rickety economy will be just as uncompetitive on Tuesday. What will the poor waggonists do then?
If either Dr. Peter Phillips or Dr. Peter Davies had won the PNP presidential elections, the very same economic backwardness would exist. If we had a socialist revolution tonight and nationalised all large business enterprises in Jamaica, we would simply move from an uncompetitive backward capitalist economy to an uncompetitive backward socialist economy. If community-based development became the norm and we spent all the $42 billion in the National Insurance Fund on microenterprise finance in the next couple of months, we would still have the very same rachitic economy we have now. Personalities and politics never solve economic problems. They never have and never will.
Whether Davies, Shaw, Jesus of Nazareth, Mary Magdalene or the Devil Incarnate is the Finance Minister, our deep-seated problems of low productivity and uncompetitiveness will persist. There is no political solution. There are no shortcuts or economic Da Vinci codes hidden somewhere. There are economic solutions. But these are hard, require patience and sweat, and take time - plenty time. Not helpful in winning elections or for feeding power-hungry egos.
EDUCATIONAL FAILURE
Our rotten educational performance tells it all. At the GSAT level, the average score in mathematics is 48 per cent. In language arts it is 52 per cent. By the time we reach the CXC level the problem has got much worse.
First off, only 46 per cent of the eligible cohort even sit CXC mathematics, while only 56 per cent sit the English language exam. The pass rate in English of this diminished cohort has never reached 60 per cent and is usually below 50 per cent.
In mathematics, the same reduced cohort has a pass rate of about 36 per cent. Despite the huge real increase in educational expenditure (over six per cent of GDP) Jamaica's performance in CXC English and math is below that of every single country in the English-speaking Caribbean, except Grenada and Guyana.
Next year will be the 25th anniversary of HEART. Yet after nearly a quarter of a century more than 70 per cent of our employed labour force have no training in the jobs which they do every single day! Don't blame HEART. More than half of the applicants cannot pass the entrance exam. I can guarantee you one thing: more focus on early childhood education will not address that burning problem.
In such circumstances, low productivity, uncompetitiveness, trade deficits and budget deficits are inevitable. We are bound to have shortfalls and have to borrow and run up huge debts. This has nothing to do with Omar Davies, Audley Shaw, Bruce Golding, Edward Seaga, P.J. Patterson, Portia Simpson Miller or, for that matter, Don Robotham. When will we stop this childish Jamaican game of looking for some devil or messiah to pin our problems or our hopes on? Look at the social realities not the personalities.
TRADE DEFICIT
Given our dismal educational levels, the goods and services which we produce must be low value added. If the value-added is low, then wages and salaries are bound to be low. If we want to consume all the goods and services produced by the modern global economy (oil, cars, computers, name brand clothes) and all we have to sell in return is a little tourism, sugar and banana, then we are bound to have a massive trade deficit. Last financial year our goods deficit reached US$2.587 billion!
A government can, of course, attempt to paper over these brutal realities by raising wages, running deficits or raiding pension funds. Call this 'balancing peoples lives'. But the economy knows well how to respond to such 'play-play' balancing. Inflation arrives and balances you back! The paper wage increases and microenterprise credits, which only yesterday were greeted with shouts of joy, somehow vanish overnight. Black markets, devaluation and capital flight jolt us back to earth, 'before you quint,' as the advertisement tersely puts it. Politicians often attempt to redistribute income. The market simply redistributes it back in Round Two.
THE DEVELOPMENTAL STATE
In the face of these realities, the JLP has fallen in love with the East Asian developmental state as their rod of correction. This is in tune with the profoundly statist mentality which has characterised JLP economic thinking since the 1960s. All the pompous verbiage about 'rules-based' and 'measurable and enforceable' and 'sealed and tight' is a product of their sardine tin apprenticeship at the feet of the One Don. In the JLP we have a singular case of a capitalist party which distrusts the market and loves the state. Such market phobia is itself an expression of intellectual backwardness.
Mr. Golding is predicting all sorts of economic miracles resulting from various state-led initiatives that he is dying to introduce. Grandiose development projects 'creating' thousands of jobs will spring from nowhere, perhaps financed by Jah. May I remind the JLP that this statist megalomania was precisely the source of their economic failures in the 1980s and their dramatic falling out with the U.S. administration? This mentality is what caused the public sector deficit to be 13 per cent of GDP in 1985, a grossly uncompetitive exchange rate, food consumption per capita to fall by six per cent in 1984 and a further one per cent in 1985, according to the World Bank. This, despite receiving economic support of over US$1 billion from the U.S. Government, none of which is available today. What a 'hard-ears' bunch! Do they never learn?
When one hears Mr. Golding nattering on about the state doing this and the state doing so much that one wonders which state he is talking about. The dilapidated Jamaican one which can't even run a patty shop? Wake up, Mr. Golding, and deal with reality.
