Dear Editor,

Over and over you hear various government officials admonishing young people to stay in the country and build up Jamaica. I have only one question for those officials: Build with what?!

The situation in the country seems to become more dire by the second. Unemployment used to trickle upward, but now the levels seem to be flowing powerfully, filling the dam of despair. The Government keeps saying job creation is key, but I don’t know if they’ve noticed that, in a time of such economic instability and uncertainty, nobody wants to lend some unemployed, twenty-something-year-old money to try to start a business. Everybody wants the guarantee of certain return on their investments. But as I was recently reminded, only two things in life are certain: death and taxes.

Then, there is the conveyor belt of employment. This illustration simply sees the same old people going around and around to the same jobs; merely trading places, with seemingly only death or migration creating an opening for new persons on the belt, compounded by the fact that apparently no one can afford to retire.

Every prospective employer is seeking experience, but aside from the lessons in school or volunteering — it can be expensive to the volunteer while the organisation profits — no one wants to offer a chance for young people to get such experience.

So many of the nation’s brightest are sitting at home with their hard-earned college degrees in the closets acquiring dust. People keep on asking, “Why don’t you go and do your master’s?” Well, maybe thet thonk that the money has already been secretly stowed away, so everyone can afford a master’s or that even such a degree guarantees a job. I don’t know what reality they live in, because although a master’s degree purports to give you an edge, it guarantees nothing, and you could still end up sitting at home with the undergrads with an even bigger student loan and no job to repay it. Smile for your picture in the Students’ Loan Bureau wall of shame.

If then, there is an opportunity to leave, why should one stay? What stimuli is there to cause them not to leave? Patriotism? Hardly.

Will Jamaica ever truly become a place to live, work, raise families and do business? I don’t know, but if the grass is greener on the other side, you can be sure the cows will graze there.

Mcnaught Allen

mcnaughtallen@gmail.com