Minister Karl Samuda has recently reminded me of the work we did on the National Industrial Policy (NIP) when he was a People's National Party (PNP) minister of state for industry. I was then coordinator for a UNDP/GOJ project for strengthening national capacity in science and technology for development. The NIP was driven by the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), which was headed for part of that time by Omar Davies who left to join the Government in the finance ministry from the Senate, and then from the garrison safe seat of Southern St Andrew.

Policy formulation, apparently, does more for the planning agency than for the country. The institute is now occupying prime uptown property in swanky New Kingston, "bought from its own resources". Meanwhile, downtown, where the PIOJ was located two stops ago, rots.

It is simply amazing how badly downtown has deteriorated since I first met the city as a gawking child. Now the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) has unveiled an elaborate plan to rehabilitate the city in short order, by 2012. I share the prime minister's expressed reservation about how realistic the plan is. Maintenance is much easier than restoration, and we didn't do it.

I also share Central Kingston's MP Ronald Thwaites' stormy objections to the planners not having consulted dwellers of the rehab area. Now, you can easily slide into the paralysis of consultation as we have often done, but, absolutely, political leadership and representative groups of citizens should properly be consulted for a major development plan so intimately affecting them.

guiding economic growth

The purpose of the long-forgotten National Industrial Policy was to guide economic growth in selected high-potential sectors. P.J. Patterson, the prime minister then, even boasted of the prospects of six per cent per annum. In an entire generation, the country has never experienced more than three per cent economic growth per annum and is often in the negative. Something not right.

Last Friday, July 4, was the anniversary of the birth of PNP co-founder and National Hero Norman Manley. No one in pre-Independence Jamaica had a clearer and more powerful vision for growing Jamaica. And we mean very much more than economic growth. By growing Jamaica, we are talking about taking a course of action "so that Jamaica may, under God," as the National Pledge proclaims, "increase in beauty, fellowship and prosperity and play her part in advancing the welfare of the whole human race".

Manley's party, which is 70 this year, has learned the difficult lesson that neither the 'mouth water' Fabian socialism on which it was founded, nor any stronger variety, provides an adequate foundation for growing a nation.

At Independence, the young Edward Seaga, the minister of development and welfare, was easily the leading visionary of what an independent Jamaica should look like. I have read several times the Five-Year Independence Development Plan, 1963-1968, which he crafted. But then, he poured a lot of energy into building Tivoli Gardens, an excellent example of what Jamaica should not become.

As with the National Industrial Policy, I, along with a whole little army of patriotic Jamaican, poured a lot of time and energy into the 1990-1995 Five-Year Development Plan of the Michael Manley second administration, only to see the plan derailed and forgotten.

Perhaps our plans for growing Jamaica are too elaborate, too complicated, too insensitive to basics, and too half-heartedly pursued for really good results, as Prime Minister Golding fears for the UDC plan for the rehabilitation of core Kingston.

People are at the heart of growing a nation. And Jamaica has not done well at growing people. As every education performance index is showing, the country is failing to produce competent, skilled, disciplined and ready citizens and workers. And most of the best, 75 per cent of tertiary-level graduates, migrate, mostly because 'things not right' here.

Values and attitudes

But skills, intellectual and practical, alone are not sufficient. Values and attitudes matter perhaps even more. P.J. Patterson, as prime minister, went after a reformation of values and attitudes but failed to follow through. Let me fall back on US economic columnist Warren T. Brookes' 'Goodness and the GNP' to make the point that an economy is more metaphysical than mathematical "in which intangible spiritual values and attitudes are as important as physical assets and morale more fundamental than the money supply. A national economy, like an individual business or specific product, is the sum of the spiritual and mental qualities of its people, and its output of value will be only as strong as the values of society".

Brookes pointed out that "not only is the family the basic social unit, it is the fundamental economic force in society, the key to work, consumption, savings, investments, and the whole future thrust of any nation". The evil manifested in the number and quality of growing violent crime, and the state of Jamaican family life are just major handicaps to growing Jamaica. Others have pointed out the key importance of trust for productive societies. Trust is extremely low in Jamaica. Carl Stone documented this years ago in his 'Work Attitudes Survey'. And I am now looking at some interesting new work on trust in Jamaica by a young UWI researcher, Paul Andrew Bourne, and his colleagues.

The State has no more basic or important function than securing the rights of citizens, including the right to life and to property. State failure to do so adequately, has led to enormous growth in the fear factor, which is a powerful inhibitor in growing Jamaica. The World Bank and others have demonstrated the economic costs of crime. The indirect costs may be even greater than the direct ones. People simply don't bother to do things - like business - which raise their exposure to criminal attack on property and life.

Corruption cripples and undermines - and kills, as it did Douglas Chambers. And there is just too much of it in the system for robust long-term growth to take place. Growing Jamaica will require taking care of intangibles like improving human capital, increasing security and trust, and reducing corruption. It cannot be done by balancing the books. Indeed, the books will never be balanced until the cultivation of 'goodness' is calculatedly made a policy issue.

Martin Henry is a communication-consultant. Feedback may be sent to medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.