DAWN RITCHSOMETIMES I think I live on a
different planet. Nothing else can explain the docility with which the terrible news has been received, that Jamaica sent out half a billion U.S.
dollars last year (US $490 million) as repatriation of profits for foreign-owned companies operating in Jamaica.
The Business Observer reported last Wednesday, that this was a 22 per cent hike over the 2003/2004 fiscal year. It's enough to radicalise me all over again.
The whole purpose of national
independence in 1962 was to keep the profits here in Jamaica. An elaborate process of Jamaicanisation was begun so that Jamaicans themselves could own the 'commanding heights' of the economy, regardless of the party in power.
I cannot believe that I have lived to see the day when these profits are not only once again flying out, but doing so with increasing speed. The last decade in Jamaica has certainly reversed the process of greater economic independence that was under way. This Government's flawed financial policies leading to the financial meltdown of the 1990s put paid to that. It is truly
frightening to think that neither of the two political parties seems to care about that, nor feels like linking it to the mounting and as yet unfathomed public debt. This is crass and irresponsible
government. Every sitting member of the House of Representatives should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
MESS OF POTTAGE
You cannot sell the nation's patrimony for a mess of pottage and expect the country to prosper. Not unless your sole ambition in government is to ensure that all Jamaicans are only PAYE employees if they're lucky, and wage slaves on their own plantation.
Publicly-listed companies that are largely owned by foreign companies pay out large amounts in dividends to their parent companies. The object of government ought therefore to ensure that most of these are owned instead by Jamaicans in Jamaica. It's that simple.
Privately-owned companies should mainly be Jamaican too. We should own the financial sector, the cement factory, the tourism sector, manufacturing and services. Briefly we once did. Growing up at that time, I was foolish enough to assume we always would. Now I'm grey it's totally different. Nobody seems to think that what now obtains in Jamaica is a remarkably wasteful and deeply
odious form of public administration of the country's only national assets.
PUBLIC RIOT
When I was a teenager, any thought of somebody selling out the country would have brought us out on the streets. It was de rigeur. Everybody knew you had to own the means of production. No one would have dared practise as public
policy then, what is accepted coolly now by all. There would have been a public riot.
So young people today may have
cellphones and motor cars, but they're missing half their lives. They will
never own their homes at this rate of impoverishment. Nor have they any hope of ever doing so. Hell, more and more of Jamaicans every day can't even afford the rent or electricity, much less the motor car.
The purpose of government is not to chase down the locals and kill them or jail them for alleged crimes and other infractions. It is to provide the inhabitants of the most beautiful country on earth with the opportunity and means to make a splendid living working right here in Jamaica.
When all is said and done, a country is finally about a people as individual souls. Not a recognised cuisine, nor even the Rastafarian religion or reggae music. It is about the vast majority of us who will never be great chefs, musicians, or found a religion, but have the good fortune to be born Jamaican and want to live here.
We pay taxes, and we're entitled not only to protection as a species, but to consideration at all times. This island is ours and we are entitled to its ownership. We should also be permitted to enjoy it in peace and tranquility.
Let it be noted however, that in the early part of the twenty-first century, we neither own it, nor are we allowed justice, much less peace and tranquility. But nobody seems particularly worked up about it. A little tense and fretful because of the killings and robberies, but not much else troubles us.
I am baffled by how cool we have become, and how incapable of national leadership. We cannot be the descendants of Paul Bogle and George William Gordon, Jamaicans whose activities sent an English governor to trial in London. This is what's wrong with education in this country; we don't teach our own subversive history anymore. We are therefore threatened with becoming a pale imitation of our former selves. No one is prepared to fight for what we've always been: gracious, courageous and hospitable.
NATIONAL SPIRIT TRANSFORMED
Instead, this national spirit has been transformed today into economic wage labour, prostitution and 'cronyism'. The worst part of it all from an identity point-of-view is that this is all happening under a People's National Party government. This is not the transformation Michael Manley had in mind when he introduced the bauxite levy as prime minister. The levy put the country under pressure internationally, but it was a guilty
pleasure for the vast majority of
residents like a goal in a football match.
This current state of affairs is no
pleasure, nor are we guilty. We cannot possibly generate and that's counting every able-bodied and employed one
of us all the earnings needed for hard currency company profit repatriations, and pay off the national debt too.
Furthermore, every penny the Government gets from overseas aid, it wastes. Some years ago, it was 55 cents in the dollar wasted in Jamaica, according to an international study. So who can dream to think of what it must be today?
Debt servicing is already absorbing 65 cents in every tax dollar of the country's revenues. Sooner or later there will be no money to run the rest of the country.
