Dear Reader,

So the deal with the International Monetary Fund is signed and sealed, and one gets the feeling that there is a virtual mood of celebration in the air, and perhaps justifiably so. After all, our country has been rescued from the brink of the financial precipice, and the IMF has pulled us back from the edge and has put us on life support. So I imagine that we ought to give thanks.

But as some Jamaicans breathe a collective sigh of relief, it is instructive that we ask the question, how did we get here again? If for no other reason but to ensure that we avoid making the same mistakes we made before.

And the past is haunting us in a big way right now as the country stands witness to the Finsac Enquiry currently under way. It seems ironic that both the IMF agreement and the Finsac Enquiry should be happening at the same time. There is no doubt in my mind that if the 1990s wipe-out of almost the entire entrepreneurial class had not taken place, it is highly likely that the country would not have had to return to the IMF. I hold firmly to the view that the debacle of the Finsac period guaranteed Jamaica’s return to the IMF.

The Finsac story as it now unfolds is not just a story about financial losses and selective rescues. It is a story of the recklessness, ineptitude, insensitivity and callous disregard for the citizens of the country by an administration which seemed more intent on satisfying special interests than on preserving the very backbone of a nation, namely the small and medium-sized business operators.

The Association of Finsac’d Entrepreneurs has estimated that over 30,000 people were destroyed by the policies pursued during the financial meltdown of the 1990s. Add to that the numbers in each household who would have been impacted by the large-scale unemployment that resulted from the hundreds of collapsed entities, and the figure of 30,000 could easily be quadrupled.

One Finsac’d entrepreneur told me that his 544-acre farm provided employment for 150 people. He and his family had been operating the farm for over 11 years and were gearing up to reap successes from the diversity of entities on the large expanse of land they owned. One section was dedicated to winter vegetables, coconuts and bananas. Another section had a thriving fish farm, and yet another was engaged in sand and gravel mining. To top it off there was also a tourism component that he described as a “short trip” river-rafting attraction. He lost it all, including a resultant painful divorce. He initially borrowed $2.8 million, which climbed to $50 million in a few years. Even after he sold his farm, his house and several other pieces of real estate, he was still owing $12 million. Today he is just trying to get himself back on his feet.

“I don’t think that there is any way to fully calculate the damage that Finsac did to Jamaica,” one businessman remarked. “It’s incalculable.” “It is not only the staggering financial losses that people incurred, it is also the deep emotional damage that you can’t put a dollar value to,” he continued. “How do you calculate and compensate for somebody’s life?” he asked.

And the stories told by many of those affected are indeed heart-wrenching. The sadness in his voice was palpable as a fellow Finsac’d businessman told how his friend took his own life. “It was early Friday afternoon when he called his staff together and informed them that he could not meet the payroll that week. He then walked into his office, took out his 9 millimeter pistol and blew his brains out. He had been under immense pressure to pay the bank and he just couldn’t take it any more.”

The other two stories of suicide were equally disturbing as the gentleman related them to me. “The men just could not stand the pressure any longer. One of them just took a seat in his rocking chair at home and killed himself with his shotgun. The other set himself and his house afire when he heard that they were coming to foreclose. He perished, and a section of the house burned down.”

The damage caused by Finsac is indeed inestimable. In fact it is damage that not even the best results of the enquiry could possibly repair. “Many of us could have cut and run like so many business people did,” a Finsac’d businessman confessed. “I watched several big businesses entities put their manufacturing companies up for sale and then just sat easy collecting the high interest on government paper. We just didn’t have the heart for it,” he said. “We were concerned that our workers would have to go home, and we knew they had families to feed. We tried to keep our businesses afloat, but the pressure was too much to bear, and we found ourselves in a bottomless pit. The more we paid, the more we owed.”

There is no country on earth that could have withstood the levels of economic dislocation and destruction caused by the almost complete decimation of the small and medium-sized business sector and survive, let alone a country like Jamaica with the serious and long-standing structural and systemic economic problems that we have. The Golding government may be the ones who inked the deal with the IMF, but the script for the Fund began to be written during the financial meltdown of the 1990s. It was just a matter of time before the Finsac period caught up with us, and we are all now forced to swallow the bitter IMF medicine.

With love,

bab2609@yahoo.com