THE night the mountain fell down on Port-au-Prince, the resulting rubble blanketed all social classes —elites and marginalised, natives and expatriates — into a common humanity ordinarily absent for most of the 200-plus years of Haiti’s existence as the second oldest republic in the Americas.

It made President René Préval a homeless man as the earthquake destroyed both his private house as well as the presidential palace, thus temporarily placing him in the position that has long been the permanent status of the millions in Haiti’s depressing slums.

For most of the history since the Haitian people defeated France’s mighty Napoleonic armies, the country has been unable to fulfil the goals of a non-racial, democratic constitution and has been ravaged by a combination of external invasion and aggression, environmental degradation, natural disasters and domestic misrule.

Arguably, though, Haiti’s most serious underlying social problem is the huge wealth gap between the impoverished Creole-speaking black majority, comprising most of the 10 million population, and the French-speaking minority, one per cent of whom own nearly half of the country’s wealth.

These problems have remained largely unaddressed despite continued interventions and international assistance, including the tens of thousands of international military and civilian aid workers living on the island when the earthquake struck Tuesday evening.

Their presence has not saved the physical and governmental infrastructure from all but collapsing, and drug trafficking has corrupted the judicial system and the police. Jamaicans are all too familiar with the guns-for-drugs trade that our officials say is a contributor to our own high murder rate.

Given the scale of the disaster, which was just beginning to emerge Thursday evening (at the time of writing), it is clear that an unprecedented rescue, relief and rehabilitation effort will be required.

Initial response of the international community — including Caricom member states — as well as the support from ordinary citizens the world over, suggests a willingness to help despite the logistical difficulties to get assistance to those in need. Regrettably, assistance will arrive too late for some.

Meanwhile, a question that must be placed on the agenda now is what will happen after the initial relief effort is over and the attention of the world media shifts from Haiti to whatever new story emerges in some other part of the world. Will there be sufficient resources to sustain the massive reconstruction of human, social and physical relationships required to stabilise the country?

Former US president Bill Clinton, speaking as the United Nations point man on Haiti, has promised that there will be a sustained commitment to long-term development, and current president Barack Obama seemed to be signalling a new United States commitment to finally do right by Haiti.

At one level, the huge global community of sympathy created by the power and reach of the new information and communications technologies is unlikely to disappear and should help to keep Haiti in focus.

The larger unresolved question is whether the global and domestic powers that have conspired against the fundamental interests of the Haitian people will use the crisis to set Haiti on a path of sustained human and economic development. It must not be a return to the miserable status quo that existed up to the time the quake struck.

A seismic shift in attitudes

According to the experts, the magnitude 7.0 earthquake was the result of seismic activity on the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault zone ( EPGZ) which runs along the southern side of the island of Hispaniola (shared by Dominican Republic and Haiti) through the Caribbean Sea up to the Plantain Garden River area in Jamaica.

Up to Tuesday the largest event associated with this fault zone was the 1907 Kingston earthquake which destroyed the city.

Hence, from the perspective of earthquake scientists, the event that occurred in Port-au-Prince could just as easily have occurred in Kingston.

There was another connection. Prime Minister Bruce Golding unveiled a hugely ambitious economic programme which, if it succeeds, may generate a seismic shift on how governments manage the economic policy and put Jamaica on a path to economic growth.

After much priming of key stakeholders, Mr Golding on Thursday launched the Jamaica Debt Exchange (JDX) programme, which is expected to save the country $40 billion in interest expenditure on domestic debt over the next financial year.

Under the programme, some $700 billion worth of domestic government bonds (about half the debt) which carry varying interest rates, ranging up to 28 per cent, is to be retired and replaced with debt at considerably lower interest rates and longer maturities.

Bondholders are guaranteed 100 per cent of the principal sum but will take a substantial hit in the interest rates they have enjoyed for years – under the former PNP administration and the current government.

The decision to place some of the burden of meeting government expenditures on individuals, the banks and other institutional investors comes after the two tax packages announced in 2009, including the Christmas Special on gas and electricity of some $22 billion. The taxes have been criticised for being inequitable; hence the decision to spread the burden is a move in the right direction.

The additional taxes and debt exchange programme are part of the prior conditions that the Government must meet before the executive board of the International Monetary Fund signs off on a 27-month US$1.3-billion stand-by loan facility to the Government.

Together, the IMF, World Bank, International Development Bank and the Caribbean Development Bank have collaborated to provide the island with US$2.4 billion over the period.

There is no question that the substantial savings in interest payment will provide much-needed breathing room for the Government to get its house in order, but it is only one step.

Mr Golding said that the initiative was “a critical part of an economic programme designed to steer the economy out of the recession and into a new era of opportunity for sustained growth”.

But there is no certainty. Success will depend on several factors, including the details of the promised overall economic programme, the extent to which the dollar remains stable, inflation is kept low, the new lower interest rate regime is sustained over the long term, and cheaper money is available to the private sector. Government must also speed up reform of the public sector, including trimming the size of the Cabinet.

But perhaps the greatest imponderable is whether the Golding administration has the capacity and the discipline to follow the programme strictly, even with the IMF looking over its shoulder. Some of the recent bungling does not inspire confidence but, hopefully, lessons have been learnt and will be applied.

The prime minister noted that for decades, under successive administrations, the practice has been for “politics to triumph over economics”. He has promised (another) new beginning. If only there could be a break with the negative past in both Port-au-Prince and Kingston.

kcr@cwjamaica.com