The next 50 years

Don Robotham, Guest Columnist

Watching Alia Atkinson swim her heart out in the 100 metres breaststroke reminded me, as it should all of us, why we can be optimistic about the future of Jamaica. The answer, simply put: it's the Jamaican people, stupid!

These same Jamaican people, some of whom commit gruesome murders every day and involve ourselves in all manner of evil, possess qualities of unparalleled courage, determination and human warmth rarely encountered elsewhere. Medal or no medal, Atkinson and all our athletes embody these qualities. What they are doing is teaching us to recognise these qualities in ourselves - there is the real gold, more valuable than all the metal ornaments being handed out in London.

Our future depends on us releasing these talents - which the Jamaican people possess in abundance - and channelling them in positive directions.

This is easier to say than to do, because Jamaica is celebrating its 50th anniversary of political Independence at one of the most difficult periods in world history. From 1494, and especially after 1655, the Jamaican economy developed as an integral part of the expansion of the Western capitalist system. When we became politically independent in 1962, this was at the height of the postwar boom in the global economy, and the Jamaican economy, therefore, boomed with it.

In 2012, however, we are marking our 50th in the midst of the worst global recession since 1929-31. It is as if we were celebrating our anniversary in the midst of the Great Depression - the locust years of 1934-36, which immediately preceded 1938. So, 2013 will be our annus horribilis, with 2014 possibly worse. While we celebrate our anniversary with pride and gusto - we have much to be proud of - we must also prepare ourselves soberly to weather this coming storm.

Focus on THE GRASS ROOTS

It will not be easy. But we can not only survive it, but turn the adversity to our advantage if we understand one thing and act firmly on it: the future of Jamaica depends on the country being opened up in all respects to the talents and aspirations of the grass roots of Jamaican society - the upcoming middle and lower class, the rural grass roots, the striving urban poor and their children.

So far, this has occurred in only two areas: sport and popular culture. The results are there for all to see. If we want to overcome our economic, political and social difficulties, we have to extend this process deeply into the economy, our educational system and our broad socio-political and cultural life. For, while the challenges facing us over the last 50 years have been global in origin and largely outside of our control, our failure to grapple with them successfully was local and of our own making.

For example, it was clear from the 1959-63 period when sugar output averaged a record 492,000 tons per year that our productivity was in terminal decline. Jamaica's days as a 'plantation economy' were numbered. Our strategy to counter that reality was a modified Arthur Lewis model-import substitution serving a CARICOM market, plus expansion of bauxite and, especially, tourism. This gave us a limited respite in the 1960s and 1970s, but not enough to prevent stagnation. For none of this was based on putting the interests of grass-roots Jamaica first.

Muddled model

Our education system, for example, although much expanded and improved after 1962, basically assumed that the majority of Jamaicans would remain hewers of wood and drawers of water - but now in factories, mines and hotels, rather than on sugar and banana plantations. Therefore, where there was limited growth in the economy, the distribution of the benefits of growth only ended up fostering increased inequality, growing social tension and crime.

Even in the heyday of Michael Manley's redistributive economic policies, outside of efforts in the cooperative sector, the community enterprise organisation projects and the aborted people's production plan, the approach remained basically unchanged: Left- and Right-wing proletarianism.

The attempt to revive this model on an export-led basis with the expansion of the 807 garment sector in the 1980s came to a crashing halt with the coming into effect of NAFTA in 1994 - Mexico and Central America benefiting at our expense. All these efforts from Left and Right, laudable as they were, missed one key point: Jamaicans, with our extremely deep small-farmer individualistic traditions, do not wish to hew wood and draw water for anyone but themselves. Any economic, social or political strategy which ignores this rather obvious reality, no matter how meritorious or theoretically correct, is doomed to fail.

A NEW VISION

This is the reality which we ignored in our first 50 years. This is what we must fix now and in the coming 50 years. In our economy, it means really supporting the modernisation (technology, packaging, marketing, finance) of the small and medium-enterprise sector - rural and urban - as a number one priority - more important than Chinese-financed infrastructure projects, Russian-financed mining expansion or even International Monetary Fund financial support -crucial as those all are in the immediate short term. It means focusing not only on growth but on the distribution of the benefits of growth.

In the education system, it means really transforming the secondary system in which our youths are currently languishing. It is not a matter of sidelining the big private sector and the upper-middle class. These groups have an indispensable role and we will not progress without them. It is a matter of building partnerships in which the focus will be on the grass roots.

We have thousands of Atkinsons, Bolt, Blakes and Powells all over Jamaica. What we have achieved in sport we can achieve in our wider economy and society.

Professor Donald Robotham is an anthropologist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.