Peter Espeut
I HAVE to give the Ministry of Finance credit for pulling off a strategic misallocation of the fund of the National Housing Trust. It must have been tempting: a huge national debt, a series of government ministries demanding budget increases, and this huge pool of money sitting there growing. Did the discussion go something like this?
How can we get our hands on some of the money in the NHT fund to augment the budget? What excuse can we use? Can we say we want to use some to repay our national debt? No, the public would never go for it. Can we say we want to use some to pay the salaries of politicians and civil servants? No! There would be a hue and cry. Can we say we want to use some of the NHT money to pay for trips abroad to raise more loans? No, that would open the door to the suggestion that the trust fund could just be merged with the Consolidated Fund. What about using some to fund education? That's it! No one would dare to come out in public and fight against spending on education for the poor. And then we can use some of the money we were going to spend on education to pay the national debt, to pay ourselves, and to travel abroad to raise more loans.
A LOT SAID
It's a samfie trick! Whatever from the NHT fund you spend for other than its legal mandate, is budget replacement; it is the equivalent of putting it in the Consolidated Fund. That can't be right.
A lot has been said about the use of NHT funds to design and build what has been called 'Emancipation Park' from which much political mileage has been sought. But that was not a place where the emancipated slaves actually celebrated their legal freedom. There were gatherings all around Jamaica, the principal one being in the Parade Square, Spanish Town (since renamed Emancipation Square), where the governor, Sir Lionel Smith, read the Proclamation of Freedom on August 1, 1838, flanked by the first Anglican Bishop of Jamaica, Dr. Christopher Lipscomb, and Baptist minister James M. Phillippo. In Kingston there was vociferous jubilation from an immense gathering at the Kingston Race Course; for Kingston dwellers that is the real Emancipation Park.
If the real intention was to celebrate emancipation, historical research would have revealed the proper place. And how much more does city Kingston's only public recreation spot - National Heroes Park - deserve to benefit from the largesse of the National Housing Trust than the NHT's own private land? National Heroes Park is the equivalent of Central Park in New York City, Green Park in London, the Mall in Washington DC, or Queen's Park Savanna in Port-of-Spain; all of those are maintained as public space for all classes of persons to use. National Heroes Park - where the former slaves of Kingston and St. Andrew first celebrated their freedom - is a disgrace to that memory, and has been ignored in favour of an uptown former golf course.
The government has got itself into quite a bind with its local debt. You remember how it began. It determined that there was 'excess liquidity' in the money market which was being converted into foreign currency, thus putting the exchange rate at risk; so they floated bonds at high interest rates to 'mop up liquidity' and soon foreign exchange poured in from all over the world to take advantage of the windfall interest rates offered by this poor country, Jamaica; in addition every pension fund and money market broker bought into a piece of the action.
IMPOVERISH US
It was a poor strategy because it was not designed to target the particular 'excess liquidity' that was perceived to be a problem, and it has impoverished us as a nation; the result - as one party executive member has put it - is the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since the abolition of slavery, since emancipation; and the transfer continues as we speak.
When is it going to end?
Peter Espeut is a sociologist and is executive director of an environment and development NGO.
