I keep six honest serving-men

(They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

And How and Where and Who.

The above is the first stanza of Rudyard Kipling’s celebrated poem I Keep Six Honest Serving Men. Kipling’s message/warning is particularly important at this time. We are now flush in the season in which wolves in sheep’s clothing will try their desperate best to pull wool over the eyes of, especially, unsuspecting Jamaicans. Those of us who have the knowledge have a duty to strenuously push back against merchants of tomfoolery, who are now working overtime to ensnare our minds, so that they can commandeer our actions for their selfish benefits.

It is a fact that, if enough Jamaicans behave like sheep, wolves of all kinds will convince us that they will become vegetarians as soon as we allow them to become our shepherd. They are liars!

Kipling’s poem centres on the importance of asking questions. The six questions above represent the very basic steps which must guide curiosity, analysis, and problem-solving. Let us ask questions.

Where’s the beef?

Consider this: ‘Robinson: PNP will safeguard Jamaica’s fiscal stability as Gov’t’. The news item delivered this and related information: “Opposition spokesman on finance Julian Robinson says the next People’s National Party (PNP) Administration will safeguard the country’s fiscal stability should it win the general election later this year.

“Robinson gave the assurance while addressing the 20th Regional and Capital Markets Conference put on by the Jamaica Stock Exchange.” (Nationwide News Network, January 24, 2025)

“Mouth mek fi talk,” rural folks in their philosophical wisdom often warn.

This is not the first time Robinson has issued the above promise. Why should well-thinking Jamaicans believe him, given the profligate spending of previous PNP administrations? There is a clear disconnect between Robinson’s promise and the promise of a new heaven and a new Earth, which Opposition leader and PNP President Mark Golding and many of the PNP’s standard-bearers have been wholesaling and retailing on the political stump during the last three years of campaigning throughout the country.

Robinson’s promise vis-à-vis the delivery of the mountain of promises made by PNP spokespersons and party standard-bearers are mutually exclusive. It’s impossible for both things to be true at the same time. Jamaicans must not act like sheep. We have a duty to ask questions and insist that those who come to us saying, “Give us power and we will make your life better,” are judiciously interrogated. Whether they come genuflecting or stand erect does not matter. Well-thinking Jamaicans must focus like a laser beam on the logic and/or lack thereof of those who come begging to manage the country’s affairs. We have a duty to do all we can to avoid national catastrophes, in so far as our direct and indirect participation in our democracy does allow. The catastrophic economic, social and political lessons of the past should be enough to remind us that, once the horse has bolted, it is very difficult to catch it and put it back behind the starting gate.

In our 62 years of political independence, no PNP Administration has delivered meaningful economic growth. None! I have presented ample evidence previously. Each time the PNP has formed the Government it has applied a wrecking ball to the economy. There are no ifs, buts, or maybes — the consequences have been near-catastrophic for us.

Ponder this headline from The Gleaner of January 24, 2005: ‘Golding promises local farmers to flourish under new PNP Administration’. I could cite similar headlines which typify dozens of promises which have been retailed and wholesaled during the last three years. Were the PNP to get back the keys to Jamaica House, where would the money come from to fulfil these promises? We must ask questions.

Opposition leader and PNP President Mark Golding, in his last two budget speech presentations, among other things, promised that a future PNP Administration would fix hospitals plus other public health facilities and equip them with state-of-the-art medical apparatuses. He promised to remove dilapidated buildings from the landscape. He also promised more housing, better roads, and increased help for the dispossessed and downtrodden. Where would Golding get the billions to fund all his promises?

But for one instance, Golding did not provide any evidence of how he would or even partially fund his trailer load of promises during his two most recent budget presentations.

“I will… I will,” means nothing if you cannot viably say how you are going to fully fund your plans to make them into reality.

After three years of criss-crossing Jamaica and listening to the people, as the PNP says it has carefully done, Golding is yet to provide viable answers to the following questions.

1) Where are his new and/or better ideas on how to grow the Jamaican economy faster?

2) Where are his new and/or better ideas to remedy the long-standing matters of social decline?

3) Where are his new and/or better ideas to fix the choking issue of major crimes, and murder in particular?

4) Where are his new and/or better ideas to better remedy the long-standing challenges in education?

5) Where are his new and/or better ideas to cauterise the Herculean problems associated with squatting, and insufficient access to affordable and decent housing? We need to be convinced that the Opposition’s ideas are ‘fundable’.

Some will, doubtless, say: “Cho, Higgins, you have been asking these question intermittently for nearly two years. You are way too fastidious.” Really?!

Consider this: ‘Duncan warns against ‘lofty and impractical’ election promises’. The Gleaner news item of last Sunday said among other things: “Fiscal Advisory Committee Chairman Keith Duncan has warned against ‘lofty and impractical’ promises, including raising the income tax threshold or slowing debt repayment, as Jamaica heads toward a general election due by September.

“‘As election festivities reach fever pitch and the ‘silly season’ intensifies, both political parties should jettison the temptation to overpromise election goodies for which we do not have the capacity to deliver owing to current fiscal constraints,’ he argued in an opinion piece published in today’s Sunday Gleaner.

“Duncan added: ‘The parties should instead seek to outline to voters how we can build on the foundation of the hard-won macroeconomic stability to drive inclusive growth of the Jamaican economy.’ “

It bears repeating, we are now in the season in which political desperation and the safeguarding of personal political careers will cause some who seek high and low political office to promise the moon and the stars. Well-thinking Jamaicans must adopt the advice of Rudyard Kipling, especially at this time, and constantly as ask: What? Why? When? How? Where? and Who?

We owe it to ourselves, and more importantly we have a solemn duty to our children, to ask and insist on answers. It’s our future.

Indispensable growth

On the matter of our future, Jamaica’s future will be stunted if we do not straighten up and fly right, in relation to several crucial long-standing problems which gnaw at our ability to achieve sustained economic growth that would result in material improvements for the majority of the population.

One of the crucial areas we have to get right is the management of crime. Our high crime rate is severely costly. The Economist of March 20, 2008 stated that: “If Caribbean countries were able to reduce crime levels to those similar to Costa Rica (with a homicide rate of 8.1/100,000), their rates of economic growth would increase notably. In the cases of Jamaica and Haiti, gross domestic product (GDP) growth would be boosted by a massive 5.4 per cent annually; growth in the Dominican Republic would be 1.8 percentage points higher; and Guyana’s economy would grow by an additional 1.7 points per year.” Last year’s 19 per cent reduction in murders and related big dip in most other major crimes show significant progress.

Contrary to what some would want us to believe, meaningful economic growth is not an abracadabra act.

Last October, Julian Robinson told this newspaper that economic growth was the only sustainable path forward. He has not outlined how he would help to lead it. I am not optimistic that he will.

A prerequisite for meaningful economic growth is the laying of a sound macroeconomic foundation. It has taken some 15 years to reach that juncture. Recall that in 2010 Prime Minister Bruce Golding, along with Audley Shaw, the minister of finance and the public service, began decisive actions, including two domestic debt exchanges, to bring Jamaica’s debt trajectory on a more sustainable path. That was the genesis of Jamaica’s economic recovery programme after the PNP set the house ablaze during the 1970s and during the 18½ years, between 1989 and 2007, when they again PNP had the keys to Jamaica House.

Last November, Prime Minister Andrew Holness told the country how the governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) had pivoted to growth and how the JLP would continue in that vein if it were given another five years at Jamaica House.

Last Sunday, Mark Golding, while speaking at a political rally in St Mary, castigated the Holness Administration for failing to create meaningful economic growth, but did not utter a single sentence on how he would spearhead the creation of meaningful economic growth if he became prime minister. Rural folks say, “Tom drunk, but Tom nuh fool.” I agree.

Last Monday I heard Keith Duncan on a radio programme stressing the urgent need for economic growth. He is right. I said here in my April 15, 2023 piece that, “Without economic growth all Jamaicans are poorer, weaker, and less respected.” Let no one fool you, a country gains real respect in the global space when it massively and meaningfully increases its GDP.

If you disbelieve me, check what is happening with Guyana’s rapid climb up the global ‘respect-o-metre’. Also check how Singaporeans were treated, globally, in 1965, compared to today.

A great lesson

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel to achieve economic growth. In this respect, let’s learn from one of the greatest masters of economic growth creation, Deng Xiaoping. He was leader of the People’s Republic of China from 1978 to 1989 in the aftermath of Mao Zedong’s death in 1976.

Xiaoping’s genius was that he systematically devolved economic policy for economic and social growth to the provinces. The provinces were mandated to devise growth plans. The growth plan for the country became the aggregate of the plans of the provinces. The Chinese shifted its focus from Confucianism and instead concentrated on the study of economics and the exact sciences at all level of its education system. This is how the greatest economic miracle in the last 1,000 years started.

Xiaoping simultaneously looked around the world at economic growth models which he believed could be tailored to the needs of China. He famously adopted several of the economic growth principles of Singapore and Japan. Industrialisation of China’s coastal regions, which are today mega and thriving cities, was influenced by these visits.

Here is material evidence of Deng Xiaoping’s work? Consider this from a April 1, 2022 World Bank press release titled: ‘Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty — New Report Looks at Lessons from China’s Experience’: “Over the past 40 years the number of people in China with incomes below US$1.90 per day — the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty — has fallen by close to 800 million. With this China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. At China’s current national poverty line, the number of poor fell by 770 million over the same period.”

At present most of our municipal corporations are preoccupied with who is the greatest in the kingdom. Central government needs to utilise them similar to how Deng Xiaoping engaged his provinces.

Garfield Higgins is an educator and journalist. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or higgins160@yahoo.com.