EDITORIAL - PM must leverage her special gift

Given his former service in a People's National Party (PNP) Cabinet and his support of Portia Simpson Miller's 2006 bid for the leadership of the party, Claude Clarke's observations about the prime minister have the ring of authenticity. We believe, too, that Mrs Simpson Miller respects the opinions of her former political colleague for their absence of patronising solicitousness.

That is why this newspaper is happy to have been nipped by Mr Clarke in his observation of the special gift the prime minister can bring to leading Jamaica through what he terms its "economic minefield".

We refer to Mrs Simpson Miller's surfeit of emotional intelligence, that quality that gives her great empathy and buoys her iconic status among Jamaica's poor.

It is a strength that Mrs Simpson Miller will have to leverage to the hilt if her administration is to take the tough decisions that confront it and, at the same time, maintain social cohesion.

As Mr Clarke put it in this newspaper on Sunday: "Her vaunted love for the poor and their support for her could raise public tolerance for the pain we bear before the corner is turned."

Should anyone misapprehend the enormity of the challenge, we remind them of the size of the country's Ponzi scheme of debt and dodgy bookkeeping that masks its true magnitude.

Officially, the debt, up to last October, was $1.619 trillion, having grown by 62 per cent over the previous four years. For the first 10 months of 2011 alone, our Government added $82.4 billion to the debt, or $271.3 million a day.

The national debt, on the face of it, is around 130 per cent of the value of all the goods and services produced in Jamaica. But the full story is not told, for phony bookkeeping has deflected arrears to commercial creditors, as well as reimbursements of interest income on investments to pension schemes and other exempt persons.

For decades, our Government has been able to get away with this debt and its failure to put its fiscal house in order by running something akin to a Ponzi scam. It borrowed more and serviced its past borrowings out of the new debt.

Painful adjustments

But as it did to Ponzi-scheme runners like Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford, and brought home to Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain and other fiscally irresponsible countries, the meltdown of global financial markets and the subsequent recession signalled that the game was up. Like the troubled European nations, Jamaica, even if Peter Phillips, the new finance minister, wrings concessions out of the International Monetary Fund, must undergo adjustments that will hurt.

Mrs Simpson Miller, if her administration is not to disintegrate, will have to hold together her natural constituency, the poor and working class, while building a broader coalition of support, including the middle and business classes. She can't do it alone.

In that regard, we agree with Mr Clarke that it is fortuitous that there has been a rapprochement between herself and the cerebral Dr Phillips, who has respect beyond the working class, and with whom Mrs Simpson Miller twice battled for the leadership of the PNP.

Given the obviousness of this permutation, we are surprised that Mrs Simpson Miller didn't name Dr Phillips deputy prime minister.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.