A good acronym is like a painting. It communicates with the power of a thousand words. JEEP, Jamaica Emergency Employment Programme, is one of the best examples from politics in recent years. Mind you, I prefer the fully loaded sport utility vehicle (SUV) to its sparse cousin the Jeep and so would have gone for something like, Social Upliftment and Viability; corny, maybe, but you get the idea.

That is the risk you run with acronyms. People tend to make them say what they wish. One of the best plays upon JEEP that I have seen is, Just Empty Election Promises. It resonates because that’s a weakness of politicians everywhere. They tend to over-promise and under-deliver. The late John Fitzgerald Kennedy said, “Every president must endure a gap between what he said he would do and what he actually does once in office.” In Jamaica, the gap is very wide and it has a marked result – underdevelopment.

Our politicians are no worse than they are anywhere else. It’s the politics that incapacitates them. I have written previously about our mediaeval political arrangements, which make elected officials more beholden to the party chief than to their constituents. There are more subtle but equally dangerous practices such as having constituency caretakers working alongside elected officials who should be representing everyone, PNP and JLP. In the context of discussing JEEP, there is another practice that I think is a total waste of time. I am talking about writing political manifestos.

Each time I hear the term mentioned I think of the Manifesto of the Communist Party authored by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1847 and published 1848, close to 100 years before the advent of universal adult suffrage in Jamaica. And what is this manifesto intended to be? I will quote directly from the document: “It is high time that communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.” The Communist Manifesto had more to do with ideology than with progress. It promoted a class struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie.

That tradition has continued to this day with our political parties, which continue to write manifestos. They are nothing more than elaborate love letters by suitors intended to woo the electorate, but with less enthusiasm for keeping the promises so lavishly extolled. The JLP 2007 Manifesto reached the pinnacle in its verbosity. A single line from the preamble will suffice. “We believe that we are too rich to be so poor, too gifted to be so restricted, too blessed to be so stressed, and too anointed to be so disappointed”. I ask you, how many slices of bread will that get you?

People wonder why the deeds of our politicians fall so short of their promises. The reason is simple. The party manifesto is not a plan. It contains a lot of good intentions, a smattering of programmes, usually in outline form, but there is no strategy for converting promises into deliverables. The world has moved beyond that in how countries, organisations and companies plan for success.

JEEP promises to take us in a new direction. It has the makings of a strategy; possibly the only strategy that can get us out of the economic rut into which we have fallen. Let’s be honest with ourselves. Successive governments have failed to make the necessary investments in human infrastructure so there is a major knowledge and skills deficit. One of the surest indicators of this is our inability to convert Foreign Direct Investment into gross domestic product. Much of the investment that comes in to build hotels, etc, has to go back out to import goods and services. Jamaica clearly cannot compete globally on the basis of education or high level skills; for we haven’t produced people with these in sufficient numbers. We have to find something at which we excel and for which there is a demand; something that with the right training and little further investment, we can be among the best in the world. Then we have to milk it for all that it is worth. We have seen it with athletics and we have seen it with our music. The third frontier, as I call it, is entrepreneurship. Jamaicans are among the world’s most natural business entrepreneurs. Want evidence beyond what you see every day?

Pick up a copy of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2009 Jamaica Report from the University of Technology. It is a comparative study of the prevalence of entrepreneurial activity in countries. At 23.6 per cent, Jamaica ranks number three among the countries in the study in total entrepreneurial activity. This is an amazing asset, like athletics and music, which we have but we are failing to capitalise on. This too is confirmed by the GEM Report. Jamaica ranks among the lowest in terms of conversion of nascent (start-up) entrepreneurs to established businesses and among the highest in terms of financing of business ventures from personal resources. The obvious conclusion is that in Jamaica the system works against the many Miss Matties, Mass Joes and their progenies who are brimming with ideas, work hard and just want a break. What do we do to them? We label them hustlers and harassers, let the police loose on them, mash up their stalls, and extort their meagre earnings through high utility costs and taxation. We relegate them to being marginal consumers instead of lifting them to productive wealth-creating citizens.

From my reading of JEEP, it intends to invert the economic pyramid, giving to people at the base a hand-up rather than a handout. It promises to “move the Jamaican people from welfare to well-being and from well-being to wealth creation; to teach someone to fish rather than giving him a fish”. There is an interesting mix of ideas of how to do this: economic stimulus loans, small business loan guarantees, tax exemption for new investments which create jobs, five-year tax holiday for all start-up businesses to encourage entrepreneurship, funding for micro and small business development, and business incubators to strengthen and improve the survivability of these vulnerable enterprises.

JEEP needs to be pulled into the garage and worked on to make it an implementable and resourced strategy before it goes on the road, but the key elements are there. The Incubator and Entrepreneurial Production Centres (IEPC) Project, launched by the Portia Simpson Miller administration in March 2007, and the more recently fashioned Community Renewal Project (CRP) being pushed by the PIOJ’s Dr Gladstone Hutchinson are good starting points for operationalising JEEP.

BEEP: Building Enterprise with Equity for all our People; another great sounding acronym. It’s the only way forward. With a competent “driva” JEEP will take us there, then we can trade it in for that SUV.

hmorgan@cwjamaica.com