WHY is the JLP sulking and many walking around with long faces? It is clear that the PNP wanted power. The PNP wanted it really, really badly. You have to wonder why. Out of habit? Even if they had put up a token fight, the JLP should be happy now that the PNP has seized the reins of power from them. The reason will become apparent as time goes by.

During the election campaign the PNP claimed in cute radio ads — with an actor playing the part — that the JLP was the reason university graduates couldn’t get jobs. I thought this quite amusing.

A 2011 graduate of the prestigious Sloan School of Management of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whom I spoke to recently, told me that most of his fellow graduates and those from the MIT engineering school, who were in the past normally snapped up by employers the instant they graduated, were — up to the end of 2011 — still jobless. Jamaican university graduates jobless because of the JLP’s policies, and not the world recession? The Jamaican economy crashing because of the policies of the JLP over the past four years? If you believe this, your head must be buried in the sand like an ostrich!

When the world economy has a recession cold, our economy gets pneumonia; as demand for aluminium falls, remittances drop, more foreigners don’t have money to travel, much less keep from having their houses foreclosed by the bank, keep warm or buy food, and those who do, have to be attracted with big discounts (as I’m sure you’ve seen on cable TV ads for Jamaican hotels), and our exports (for example, cement) are down. Also, since in the past 20-odd years we didn’t grow like almost all the countries of the world, increased the size of the civil service until it now costs us just over $1 out of every $10 that we earn, and borrowed money like it was going out of style, we’re now somewhere near the back of the field in the economics race.

So basically Jamaica needs to run (like Usain Bolt) economically to get out of the hole we’re in, but too many Jamaicans are not educated to a high enough level to do this, and we don’t have idle productive capacity to suddenly rev up.

Who’s going to hire the proposed thousands of Jamaicans for low-paying call centre jobs when business is so bad in their countries that they are cutting off treatment to cancer patients with treatable cancer, as I saw on the programme 60 Minutes on CNBC, on December 14, 2011? Get real!

Also, our infrastructure like roads and rail freight system are mostly in a dilapidated state. In the case of the rail system, critical routes have been cut by roads and the rails torn up for scrap and the wooden ties used for God knows what. Our electricity costs are ridiculous. We are tied to a highway contract, for decades to come, that says if we try to build anything that competes with it, even if it is more energyefficient, we have to pay compensation to the owners of the highway.

It’s going to take some seriously bitter medicine to cure Jamaica, but how to administer it? You know bitter medicine. What happens if you force somebody to drink it for what you know is for his own good? He’ll fight you all the way until you get it down his throat, and then he’ll hate you for doing it.

The JLP now knows this. They should also have realised that you can’t run a brainy argument to persuade a man or woman whose back is to the wall and can’t see how to avoid being penniless, homeless and hungry next week.

The PNP’s promise, using the old-time politics winning methods – to use funds like the JDIP road repair money loan, etc, to create jobs, jobs, jobs – is like a farmer eating the seeds for his next crop. Happy now; starve and die later. Just like in Somalia.

Using the old-time political methods allows a political party to grab the chalice of power. But, what’s in it? Political poison!

Have you noticed developed countries like Italy and Greece looking for someone to prop them up since they’re essentially bankrupt? Have you heard that the IMF is looking around for a trillion dollars (that’s a thousand million dollars) to prop up developed and developing countries?

Increasingly, more people are now saying, in late January 2012, that another global recession is headed our way. That sea levels are rising and hotter, drier conditions can be expected courtesy of global warming, US$200 per barrel of oil (which could happen if, as they say, Iran might be crazy enough to block the Strait of Hormuz, where a lot of the world’s oil has to pass) or maybe starts a nuclear war (would you like some radioactive oil?). We’re in for a seriously rough ride this year, and for decades to come.

If you do what is necessary to let Jamaica sprint like Bolt, out of the hole we’re in, and into the front-runners of the field where we ought to be, without anybody handing out pots of gold, without printing money (been there, know what happens next), etc, using the same old-time politics of the JLP and PNP where politicians think we are mushrooms; keep us in the dark (ignorant of what they’re doing, and what funny deals they’re cutting) and feed us crap, they’ll be thrown out of power.

I wonder, for instance, what Cuba is to be paid for salaries, airfares, ground transportation, accommodation, etc, for the hundreds of health professionals who are coming to work in Jamaica? How does this compare with hiring our own people? I doubt they accept Jamaican dollars; more likely US dollars of which we are short. An open, transparent government would tell us up front why this is value for money.

If everything was in the open, what could happen?

Jamaicans rioting and throwing the bums out (like the Arab Spring), or voting and throwing the bums out. This is the political poison in the chalice of power they’re so busy grabbing from each other.

The two major parties have two serious weaknesses. First, they each want to seize and hold on to power. Second, they have cultures of secrecy. Good for them. Bad for us. The politics has to change, and dramatically. In fact, into an open form, with highly educated and trained Jamaicans, where neither the current party structures of the PNP and the JLP could survive, so that the bitter medicine can be administered. After all, the only way to administer such bitter medicine is to persuade the patient to take it himself.

C’est la vie.

Howard Chin is a member of the Jamaica Institution of Engineers.

hmc14@cwjamaica.com