Ronald Thwaites | Heads I win, tails you lose

Senator Don Wehby is a humane business leader, inspired, I believe, by Christian social principles. He says we should not borrow ourselves out of the crisis aggravated, but not caused, by the pandemic. Instead, we should grow the economy. Of course!

But how? He cites agriculture and business processing. We will come back to those sectors.

The idealistic and fetching Senator Janice Allen dreams of the day when ALL Jamaicans will have access to decent work, health, education and housing. Of course! But how?

All this in the same week when it is confirmed, once again, that Jamaica’s total factor productivity has been declining annually for two decades. Imports, except, it appears ,of motor cars, are anaemic because most people have no money to buy. Exports are down despite all the announced revving, while a Jamaican breadfruit is selling for the equivalent of $3,250 in Toronto.

News about increased numbers of business process outsourcing (BPO) workers is great. It’s a good first job, even if you have only two subjects, in an otherwise dead job market; a first step up inna life, where despite the meagre wages, you can escape depending on that’ force-up’ man who you don’t really love, maybe pay for a university course, or save up to pay for the visa application, the granting of which you really see as the source of your salvation.

Don Wehby hits a chord. Borrowing is a ‘kill-dead’ business, both personally and nationally. Jamaicans have been victims of usury since abolition until right now. In the high- interest days of the last generation, companies in export agribusiness borrowed (unwisely) at 17 per cent and paid back five years later at 71 per cent. Others borrowed foreign exchange to earn foreign exchange when the rate was 5:1 and had to repay soon after when the rate had gone to 35:1.

Hello! The nation is experiencing the same thing still. With more than a half of the national debt denominated in foreign exchange, for every one per cent devaluation (we gone nearly five per cent so far this year!) another nearly J$13 billion is added to our obligation to the same people and system who are hogging most of the foreign dollars we earn or which Aunty Roachy sends us.

Heads I win, tails you lose!

DOES NOT WORK FOR MOST

As it is set up now, Jamaica works for some, but does not for most. Wehby and Allen are thankfully attracting our attention in the Senate after an excruciatingly dull Sectoral Debate in the House, where vaccine inequity, dance party blues and shunning George held sway. Same time as declining productivity and ‘pop-down’ education, food prices, transportation costs and light bill are all increasing; same time as the likkle 10 grand can’t reach anybody yet.

So the primary surplus is fine, green sell off as the colour of financial and social preferment, high-rise soon reach twelve floors like in Miami (and they are not in an earthquake zone like us), and big money soon spend for post-COVID-19 concert – Babsy as impresario, a masked Brogad as main attraction – despite what the doctors advise.

The Roman overlords used to assuage the oppression of their slaves by giving them bread and circus whenever they got restless. We are dying to get back to the circus, laced with the opium of the lottery and the anaesthesia of white rum. But where’s the bread?

The bread can only come from a changed mindset and changed national (read budgetary) and personal priorities. Despite the priority which Don Webhy and Floyd Green would give the sector, agriculture is yet to show any surge commensurate with people’s needs; CASE is struggling and the fruit is short, although the price is high for the breadfruit in foreign (can you imagine, even stinking-toe a sell in New York!).

The advanced skills needed for higher BPO earning retention are unlikely because we refuse to get radical about the education deficit. HEART is suffering from heart failure under the prime minister’s watch, so the money earned from the sector remains a fraction of what it could be.

If we are not to borrow, if food and export agriculture are to thrive; if there is to be any prospect that Ms Allen’s egalitarian dream is not to end up a nightmare, there will have to be an early and dramatic shift of how the Government spends our taxes and what we do with the likke ‘what-lef’ of our earnings.

Everything can’t be a priority. So, sharing Allen’s dream, let us go beyond the parliament talk and follow Wehby’s prescription to invest in agriculture and universal, higher- education skills rather than in criss cars, pretty show-off, automatic school promotion, gambling, drinking and scamming – the current, cruel mirages of prosperity.

Who will lead these unpopular but vital changes?

For if all we set our sights on is to lurch back to the $7,200-a-week minimum wage ‘normalcy’ of March last year, it will be the same ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ condition for the majority of us.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.