Earl M. Bartley, Contributor
IF FINANCE and Planning Minister Dr. Omar Davies continues on the same path of setting unrealistic targets to break them with impunity, no self-respecting organisation, least of all country, will be able to even faintly support his leadership ambitions.
Maybe, since Mr. Patterson came back from retirement to become Prime Minister, seemingly surviving the Shell waiver scandal, Dr. Davies thinks that credibility does not matter in Jamaican politics, and that the people will forget everything in 'nine days'. That may be so with Jamaicans. But not to the International Credit Rating agencies, which have viewed the Jamaican authorities as a high risk, low performing government, constantly teetering on the brink for the better part of the last decade.
HIGH INTEREST LOANS
The Government celebrates each of its high interest loans as a vote of confidence in its credibility. But I have the impression that the lenders view these loans as high-risk rolls of the dice that have paid off big so far.
Dr. Davies is so used to breaking his macroeconomic targets that I believe he is probably starting to think that the day he meets a few of them he will be fired. It is one thing to set and not meet growth targets. The Government can always argue, as it has, that in a free-market system generating economic growth is the responsibility of the private sector. This is mostly a dishonest argument in our case, since the high interest policies and heavy borrowing by the Government discourage and crowd out private investment.
But the Government's difficulty with balancing the books is, at its most basic, an inability to run a tight ship, and much worse indifference to standards and the elevation of political expediency as a prime virtue.
How else might we explain Dr. Davies' penchant for setting unrealistic, nay, spurious fiscal targets, and simply greeting his failure to achieve them with a shrug. Before the October 2002 General Elections the evidence is now clear that the Government under-reported projected expenditures so that the books would look tidy for the elections.
A month later Dr. Davies admits blithely, that the Government targets are headed in the "wrong direction". In presenting the last budget, Dr. Davies predicated his budget on 18 per cent interest rates when rates in the money market were hovering at 27 per cent.
Does the Finance Minister not know that gravity works ineffectively on what is sent up in a gas balloon? Or is blithe indifference the largest streak in political expediency?
PEOPLE'S NON-RESPONSE
It is questionable how the people have responded to the equivalent of disrespect from the Government and to their thirty-year-long sojourn in economic crisis and social disintegration. They have responded with forbearance, apathy and a kind of indifference of their own.
Many argue that the best way to get on with life is to ignore the Government. But how can it be a viable strategy to ignore your victimiser? The false conclusion that many Jamaicans live by is that Government is not so much a necessary evil, but an avoidable nuisance.
The people need to 'give' themselves a break from bad governance, though, they are apparently still hoping to 'get' a break from their victimiser. It may not always be in the people's interest to use social disruption to achieve political aims, especially against governments, which are not threatening the right of their electoral removal.
At the same time, the five years between elections can be quite long and burdensome, particularly when the Government is corrupt, inefficient and without vision. Thus it might be useful for citizens to trade-off good governance practices like better anti-corruption laws, more transparent public sector contracting and improved fiscal management for the taxes and other burdens that Government might impose on them.
TRADE-OFFS
Such trade-offs, achievable through an activist civil society, are still only in its infancy in Jamaica. It was heartening to see the 'Partnership for Progress', attempting to trade-off tighter fiscal management by the Government for reduced interest rates. But it seems that the Government is trying to 'boops' the business sector hoping to get interest savings while promising 'soon come' with the fiscal legislation.
Maybe, too, the Patterson administration is hoping that money-market rates will continue to trend down, so they won't need specific concessions from any particular investor group. They are probably thinking, too, that increased revenues from tourism and bauxite mining will rescue their fiscal strategy later in 2004.
Neither of the later two outcomes is a certainty. Economic growth is generally equivalent to the 'two birds in bushes' that you should not give up the 'bird in hand' for. Further, the downward trend in interest rates domestically could be reversed, if scepticism about the Government's commitment to fiscal prudence increases internationally, forcing it to seek much of the J$130 billion it will need to borrow next year on the domestic market.
Two things stand out in the present hiatus. One is the Government's lack of vision, and the degree to which the People's National Party (PNP) has become a drag on the economy and the possibilities for positive policy evolution. 'Muddling through' has become the Government's principal survival strategy and it appears to be suffering from the lassitude of corpulence.
Splayed out at ease, members of the Government seem almost too tired to continue to drop the apples in their mouths. The people, for their part, though they massage their victim-hood with the thought that the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) doesn't hold much in the way of relief, appear to be suppressing more than a slight sense of shame. It is the shame one experiences when let down by close friends and family.
The PNP was returned to office in 1993 with the thinly-veiled promise (and hope) of "black man time". They won again in 1997, promising a car beside every house whether of wood, block and steel, or cardboard.
In October 2002 elections, while continuing to fatten their friends with road contracts, they won on mostly what Mr. Paul Burke calls "hype". Not only have the people been let down by their own kind, as disappointing as that is, they have been conned by the three-card men, three times. After such occurrences you are bound to feel foolish withdrawing into yourself and vowing never to let it happen again.
It seems to me that between now and the next elections, the people are going to need all the stoic forbearance they evolved through 350 years of slavery, to endure a Government which, like a huge, overfed and indifferent animal, is blocking their way to progress. That is, unless they can summon up the strength, the organisation, and the resolve to push it out of way earlier.
BUSH AND THE WMD
It seems that what one needs to become utterly shameless in the world, is enough power to cow others into submission. The United States as a general rule has rarely allowed shame, law or fairness to deter it from pursuing what it believes to be its 'interests'.
As they pushed West in the 18th century and coveted the land of native Americans, they converted the fairly even-handed law of the barbarian William the Conqueror into the brutish and racist precept that "the Indians had few rights that a white man needs respect." And the US Supreme Court codified such pronouncements.
Africans who were enslaved in the United States were oppressed not only with racist laws, but with a whole edifice of pseudo-scientific theories about their supposed inferiority, put forward by eminent scholars at many of today's top-rated US universities.
When American whites decided that the sea-coast on the west was desirable, and Mexico was in the way, they simply promulgated the doctrine of "Manifest Destiny". This doctrine held that it was a God-ordained moral imperative for the United States to extend from the Atlantic Ocean on the eastern seaboard to the Pacific Ocean on the west coast and the US proceeded to foment war with Mexico to gain control of what is now California.
'IMMINENT THREAT'
The often quoted remark of President Theodore Roosevelt regarding the elder Somoza "He is a S.O.B, but he is our S.O.B" has guided US selective support for dictatorships all over the world, and underscores the fact that the US has never allowed principles to subvert its interests. In its invasion of Iraq eight months ago the United States violated many principles of international law. They violated the law governing the use of force, which proscribed pre-emptive attack, except under 'imminent threat'.
The US also violated the emerging law pertaining to humanitarian intervention, which permits multilateral actions sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council.
Notwithstanding its egregious violation of international law, and despite finding no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even as it adds to its bulging stockpiles of these weapons, the United States is purporting to lay down the law for new and tougher rules of enforcement of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Again, what does it take to be so utterly shameless? Certainly, it is not credibility.
Hopefully, the emergence of China which is projected to have the same GDP as the US by 2040, if it continues at the same rate of growth, and the emergence of international civil society, will reintroduce some balance in the world.
As always, I often find it enlightening to meditate on the unfolding of the Providential Power. How many persons foresaw that eight months after US tanks rolled into Baghdad with grandiose visions of using Iraq as the epicentre for spreading (western-style) democracy and modernity throughout the Middle East, they would today be rushing under tremendous fire to cobble together a few face-saving institutions so they can markedly reduce their troop levels and loss of lives?
But do Americans ever learn? Or, considering their socialisation into great power arrogance, does each generation of Americans have to go through their Vietnam? What is that saying about a wise man learning from the experience of others, whilst fools learn from their own experience! It is sad, comical and unsettling all at once.
Earl M. Bartley is an economist and businessman. You can send your comments to adapapa@cwjamaica.com
