Two weeks ago the Government of Jamaica successfully negotiated funding from the international capital market to effect the discounted buyout of the PetroCaribe debt. Riding on its bragged creditworthiness in the international markets, the Ministry of Finance took an extra US$500 million of loan funds, in addition to the $1.5 billion needed to liquidate the Venezuelan debt.

Finance Minister Dr Peter Phillips was challenged at a subsequent press conference as to whether this extra borrowing would likely find its way into electioneering largesse. Phillips assertively dismissed this notion, informing that these monies were secured and being vitally reserved to repay National Debt Exchange bonds due April next year.

I don’t know if Dr Phillips considers us all daft, because although liquidating these bonds would most likely have required borrowing, the planning and operations of the Ministry of Finance could not have been sitting down idly waiting on such borrowing to offset the timely repayment on these bonds, given the unpredictability of the international capital market, and especially in the face of global tensions. The Ministry of Finance must have been setting aside some tranche of resources towards settling this impending debt repayment.

If so, then in the interest of transparency and for true credibility on his claim against any largesse, Dr Phillips needs to publicly identify/declare any such sinking fund resources, so that we can keep our eyes on these monies to ensure that there is no “inadvertent” spending by some dubious Ministry of Finance official.

We must also be prepared to track the monies which might flow from the increasingly likely easing of the fiscal surplus target, which could result from both the PetroCaribe debt stock reduction and the wider good behaviour of the Government under the International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme.

What then, Dr Phillips, will be the planned spending areas from such increased fiscal space? Further, based on the raft of announced and commenced projects, hasn’t the Government, in fact, started spending monies from the anticipated and aptly promised easing of the strictures by the IMF, or from the US$500m, during this explicitly announced election season?

I think our political officials need to give us more credit than they actually do. What we are experiencing in the lead-up to the impending election is déjà vu in political spending from the halls of the Ministry of Finance, a la Dr Omar Davies in 2002.

Dr Phillips, perhaps, thinks he is silkier in devising the current spend, and so may not likely consider it necessary to admit to, or apologise for this pork-barrel exercise post-elections, as did the gleefully repentant Dr Davies.

In looking more broadly at the political landscape and election spending, the public is perhaps tired of me declaring myself as an “unrepentant socialist” from the 1970s. But, in addition to my embarrassment of watching the PNP become an ideological amoeba and prostituting itself to every bidder of the immoral ilk, my pain is to see the party, originally framed on Norman Manley’s strident integrity, now just priding itself as a fabulously unbeatable election machine.

And, to literally boast that as long as they gorge their lumpen elements and public contract greedy bourgeoisie with largesse, they can afford to ignore the interest of the broader citizenry. By so doing, the party can keep itself in power to support its partisans, completely discarding their earlier noble mission and near-obligation to uplift the wider Jamaican masses, whether they were PNP, JLP, or no P at all.

Just to highlight how much they have abandoned that mission, and the resulting cost of that abdication, those of us old enough will recall the days in the 70s when their election grandmaster, D K Duncan, used to “chaw fire” against capitalism, and was one of the chief left-wing speakers against the purported crime of “the payment of interest on idle capital”. Today, now that his known people control a regional fiefdom in that department, we don’t really hear even a whisper from Donald Keith on the issue.

That kind of left-wing doctrine of the 70s trapped many young, black youth in the concept of egalitarian socialism, which basically tempered their personal ambitions and stymied their “entrepreneurial spirit”. When the PNP changed its ideological tune and narrowed its mission and loyalty to just its party cohorts, many of those now not-so-young people from the bowels of the working-class consequently languished in this new paradigm.

So, as our flip-flop association now boasts its success as managers of the economy under the dictates of international capitalism, and readies itself for more election success, I submit that the scenario presented to the black masses is that of a runaway slave from the American South, who is crouching in the safe shadows at a train station, midway the journey to a Northern haven.

In a critical moment of self-saving discernment, the masses in this country need to recognise that of the PNP “trains” parked at the station, that they perceive to be shiny, efficient, and well-equipped with the hope of taking them to ‘Beulah land’, are in fact heading due South, and thus will only be taking all of us back into the “slavery” from which we are seeking to flee.

That’s why the masses are now feeling the “whip” of personal economic constriction, and being given promises of illusory growth.

docwraythinktankup@gmail.com