Looking back, looking forward

HEART TO HEART

With Betty Ann Blaine

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Dear Reader,

One of the benefits of a new year is the opportunity it provides for us to look back and look forward at the same time. It is a reflective, yet hopeful, time of the year and an opportunity for all of us, not just the so-called "movers and shakers", to contemplate on our individual and collective lives, and by extension, the state of the country.

This year is particularly important as the country celebrates its 50th anniversary as an independent nation. The first question that must be asked is, what have we achieved over the past 50 years, and second, what will the next 50 look like?

The last 50 years have been checkered at best, and stagnant at worst. The 1960s started with the promise of Independence which had been coming from the 1938 anti-colonial rebellion for better living conditions throughout the Caribbean. The Second World War interrupted the process and the People's National Party, which had been the vanguard of the movement for Independence, and the breakaway Bustamante-led Jamaica Labour Party contested the first election under Universal Adult Suffrage in 1944. The JLP won that election. The PNP and JLP alternated in occupying the space for limited self-government after that, along with the British colonial power. In 1958 the Federation failed and Independence was achieved in 1962.

After 1962, the government, inheriting the British parliamentary system intact with a constitution granted to us by the British parliament, continued to manage Jamaica without any significant change except for the departure of the British officials. The country lived off the bauxite investment and mining operations along with the proceeds of a declining sugar industry. In the last part of the decade, political corruption and cronyism became an official practice of government. In 1972 the JLP government was replaced by the Michael Manley administration which promised the people that "better mus' come".

The 1970s, under Manley's government, proved to be a most turbulent period in the country's political life. The attempts to build a more egalitarian society were rejected by the opposition forces of the JLP, big capital and the United States -- who all feared or were concerned about the possible development of a socialist regime with ties to Cuba in the Caribbean. Some development in social legislation, free education and worker advancement took place, but the economy was literally wrecked by the political and economic sabotage that took place between 1972 and 1980.

The Seaga government ruled during the 1980s and, in what critics describe as "expected fashion", dismantled many of the structures and advances made on behalf of the Jamaican people under a programme of structural adjustment which was designed to quell people's movements around the world, fuelled by the Thatcher/Reagan cold war liberalisation policy of the time.

As a result of this ideological war, Jamaica's politics and economics became subsumed in the designs of the western superpowers and the country entered the decade of the 1990s, perhaps less independent than we were in 1962 due to the political divide and huge debt burden that was amassed.

But while there is no doubt that outside forces played a significant role in the country's "checkered" past, domestic corruption and incompetence have been equal contributors. The slogan "Party before country" may be used to describe both PNP and JLP administrations over the past decades. There is absolutely no reservation in my mind that the combination of corruption, partisanship and incompetence has served to stymie our country bringing us in this our 50th year to the brink of a "failed state".

Political commentator and University of the West Indies lecturer, Dickie Crawford, sums it up this way, "Sixty-seven years ago, the two parties have alternated in power, yet today, 50 years after Independence, the national debt stands at $1.6 trillion, 43 per cent of Jamaicans live on less than US$2.50 a day, electricity is the highest in the world at 40 cents per KWh, our Human Development Index places us just above Haiti in the region, corruption is rampant particularly in high places, and there are some 400,000 cases tied up in the courts requiring attention."

So what of the future? Perhaps the sentiments that characterise both the challenges and the hope at the same time is summed up best by the former Governor General Sir Howard Cooke in his recently published biography, God Is Good..., in which he states: "One of the unfortunate things in our country at the moment is that there is not one unifying factor that all can subscribe to, so that intellectually, physically, morally, spiritually, we are all seeing one vision, one goal. The great enabling factor coming up to Independence is that at the back of our minds we felt that we should be a free people, free to develop, and free to design the strategy that would lead to true sovereignty. Because we, all of us, were of the same mind, no matter what differences there were, the main purpose was for us to be free to be a great nation."

As we look forward to this new year, the year of our jubilee, let us embrace the potential and purpose of this great country and adopt the call made by the founder of Hands Across Jamaica, Yvonne Coke, to use our motto, anthem and pledge as the road "MAP" for Jamaica. Let us boldly step into our God-given destiny of "advancing the welfare of the whole human race".

With love,

bab2609@yahoo.com

Do you feel buying into Facebook now is a good investment for the long-run?
	Yes
	No

View Results
Results published weekly in Sunday Finance

Username:
Password:

GCT to go down, white rum prices going up

Looking back, looking forward