Happy New Year, everyone! What will we write on this clean sheet of 2022? Let us look to the lives of two beloved figures who we lost recently for inspiration — Archbishop Desmond Tutu and actor and comedian Betty White. They loved, they laughed, and they never stopped working.

My brag is that my sister Frances met and spoke with Archbishop Tutu when he visited her late boss Bishop Walker of the Episcopalian Diocese of Washington. She enthused, “Bishop Tutu could be the best stand-up comedian in the world” after he left them in stitches at the meeting. So here was a man who did not take himself very seriously, but took the pain of apartheid into his heart and helped to heal his beloved South Africa.

At his funeral over the weekend, South African Prime Minister Cyril Ramaphosa said, “He was our moral compass… he was the conscience of South Africa.” The beloved archbishop requested “the cheapest coffin possible” and asked that his ashes be planted at the root of a tree. Because, of course, he knew that his mortal condition would be giving way to immortal glory to which no funereal trimmings could compare.

At 87 Betty White co-starred as Grandma Annie in The Proposal, and at 88 was host of the legendary Saturday Night Live (SNL), cracking jokes with style and aplomb. SNL alum Seth Myers posted on social media: “RIP Betty White, the only SNL host I ever saw get a standing ovation at the after party. A party at which she ordered a vodka and a hot dog and stayed till the bitter end.”

She was the antithesis of the airhead Rose Nylund she played to the hilt in The Golden Girls, celebrating ageing with humour.

You get energy from these great humans. And we have excellent examples right here in Jamaica — the late Gordon “Butch” Stewart, Karl Hendrickson, and Audrey Stewart-Hinchcliffe. None of these three had anything much of an inheritance. They built their businesses from the ground up and used every failure to create their next success. That indefatigable patriot Stewart-Hinchcliffe declared when she received the Caribbean Community of Retired Persons (CCRP) Living Legacy Award last November: “I am a young 82; retirement is not on my agenda.”

You get energy from stories of pain and persistence, like that of Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena Williams. The movie King Richard starring Will Smith shows the dedication of a father who would not quit on his dream for his daughters. In their humble household, education remained number one as he insisted that his children should have straight A’s and be multilingual to stay in the game of tennis. And so his daughter Serena wowed the French press when she answered their questions in their language after winning the French Open.

You get energy from working hard but being happy. “Have fun,” Richard Williams told his daughters as they headed into their games. Williams wrote on a piece of cardboard that he hung on the fence of the tennis court: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

During our Advent crusade, our pastor Dr Howard Thompson used the symbols of gift-wrapping to challenge us to offer up ourselves in the new year. That offering was up to us, he said, but we must resolve to make it. Now that is something to consider in a country where there is great mourning for those who passed from COVID-19 and other illnesses; motor vehicle crashes; and, most tragic of all, from murder. Even if we have nothing material to give, we can make a call to listen with love and understanding. We can turn off our devices and give special attention to the children and elderly in our families.

None of us is planning to fail in 2022, but are we doing what our friend, CEO of EDUFocal, Gordon Swaby keeps reminding us to do, “Ignore the noise. Focus and execute”? We need to listen to this young man, whose EduFocal has helped tens of thousands of Jamaican students, who posted recently, “1/EduFocal x Transport Authority x BCIC Driver Training platform officially launched. Come January 10, 2022 we will be onboarding more than 10,000 public passenger vehicle drivers on our platform (phase 1). More than 2 years of work went into this. Very happy about today!”

As Mandela said, “It always seems impossible until it is done.” Go for it in 2022!

Growth despite COVID-19

Recent Statistical Institute of Jamaica (Statin) findings are that our Jamaican economy grew by 5.8 per cent in the quarter ending September 2021. Minister of Finance and Planning Dr Nigel Clarke noted, “The services component of our economy, which accounts for approximately 75 per cent of economic output, grew by 7.1 per cent in aggregate.” Hotels and restaurants enjoyed a whopping 114.6 per cent increase.

We have to be grateful to the members of the Economic Programme Oversight Committee (EPOC) chaired by Keith Duncan, who was also recently re-elected president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica. This man is passionate about his country’s development, dedicating his time and his own resources to ensure full disclosure on the status of main drivers of our economy.

Duncan noted this growth and spoke with optimism at last month’s EPOC press briefing. However, his warning of the arrival of the Omicron variant is now coming to pass: “With the inevitable arrival of the Omicron variant of the virus… we could see the anticipated fourth wave of COVID-19 impact. Efforts to contain the spread locally and internationally could see restrictions on economic activities in the domestic and international markets, which could lead to a slowdown in travel and disruptions in production and distribution.”

People who are not vaccinated are not only playing with their own lives, but also with the future of our country.

Back to school

Education Minister Fayval Williams says her ministry has passed over 800 infant, primary, and secondary schools for safe reopening.

Please, teachers and parents, our children need to get back to school. One lady who lives in the inner city told me the children are “running wild” in the lanes. She said there is a seven-year-old smoking ganja on her lane and that he has absolutely no supervision.

UNICEF Jamaica has conducted studies showing extreme learning loss among Jamaican children, and has called on the authorities to reopen schools in an open letter supported by other stakeholders, such as the Business Process Industry Association of Jamaica (BPIAJ), Jamaica Association of Principals of Secondary Schools (JAPSS), Jamaica Chamber of Commerce (JCC), Jamaica Employers Federation (JEF), Jamaica Manufacturers and Exporters Association (JMEA), Jamaica Youth Advocacy Network (JYAN), and National Parent-Teacher Association of Jamaica (NPTAJ).

“Jamaica’s children have lost an estimated 1.3 billion in-class hours over 19 months of physical school closures. The learning loss is staggering. The most vulnerable children who struggle to access remote education have been hit the hardest,” noted the letter dated October 2021.

It continues: “We call on the Government to urgently ensure the safe face-to-face reopening of Jamaica’s schools and to remove any barriers that stand in the way, including vaccination targets for schools …This has been done elsewhere, and we can do it too.”

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