DR Walter Rodney in his seminal book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa explains that the slave trade removed the labour force of African societies because only the fittest and the best were enslaved.

This meant the removal of the strongest and most skilled, which had a devastating effect on the capacity of these societies to carry on economic and social development. The loss of labour force resulted in both “underdevelopment” and “undevelopment”.

Jamaica’s lack of economic development is in part due to the loss of a very substantial share of the most enterprising, most hard-working and most skilled Jamaicans through migration since the middle of the 19th Century.

For most of our history we regarded the migration of Jamaicans to all parts of the world as a good thing because it was assumed that Jamaica was overpopulated. This is definitely not the case, because Jamaica is a land rich in resources which have never been sufficiently developed. The result has been underemployment and underdevelopment.

There has been a shameful and massive underutilisation of Jamaica’s land, labour and capital. This underemployment of land, unemployment of people and “misemployment” of capital can, with some justification, be blamed on the exploitation of slavery and the extraction and repatriation of surplus under colonialism.

However, there is no justification for the underdevelopment which successive governments have perpetuated since our attainment of political independence in 1962 over half-a-century ago. These governments have failed the Jamaican people because they have not valued Jamaica’s most valuable resource, which is the Jamaican people themselves.

The remittances that we depend on so heavily and which governments boast about as a sign of confidence are an indictment of governments’ manifest failure in economic policy.

Jamaica is haemorrhaging its brightest, best and hardest working people. Instead of seeing this as the disaster it is for the labour force, productivity and international competitiveness, both political parties need to recognise that no amount of remittances can compensate for the loss of an important part of the labour force. Just calculate the investment in education which has been lost to the economy through migration.

Policy must be based on valuing the most important Jamaican resource, and that is its human resources. If we can create a safe society and a rules-based private sector-led market-driven economy, we can retain our skilled labour force, and it is this that will create the economic development that we all long for.

Let us as a country devise policies that put education and the retention of our educated people at the core. Let us encourage those abroad to return to work in Jamaica and for Jamaica by creating jobs. Let us put human resources at the centre of economic policy because the more skilled people in the country, the better the prospects for economic development.

In the case of Africa’s underdevelopment, the labour force was forcefully removed. Let us hope that in the future no historian will be compelled to write that Jamaica is underdeveloped because our labour force left the country voluntarily.