POLITICS DON'T WORK.
THERE has been a thought running through this country
that politics do not work and has failed this country. And one just have to
look around at the condition of the country and it’s obvious that, that fact is
true. For fifty plus years of independence politicians have systematically
destroyed the dreams of the citizens of this country. It cannot be anything but
by design that the country is left in the state it is in.
Let’s look at the human resources that we have as a nation
and analyze how poorly politicians have manage it. From the basic school level
right through to university, we have witness the failure of our politicians
policies to develop the human resources of this country. When you have an
education system that is constructed on the basis of a conveyor belt system
that takes a student from grade seven until grade eleven without adequately assessing
how much that student has learned throughout those years, can only lead to one thing:
disaster. When you have a vocational education system that is predicated upon
quantity and not quality, there can only be one outcome: disaster.
Now the question is, why? Why have politicians believe
that it must be a policy to keep the majority of the citizens uneducated? It’s simple
actually. They do not want an educated populace thinks! Jamaican politics aren't predicated on a thinking populace. It’s just not conducive to it. If the
populace understands what governance is all about and what government should be
doing for the up-liftment of the populace, then politicians could never make
ridiculous promises that they have no intention of keeping, they couldn't buy
peoples votes for a dish of curried goat etc., because the populace would be
looking at the track record of the Government, its manifesto and how practical
those intentions are, and how will those intentions translate itself in real
benefit for the country. A thinking population is less tribalized, hence not
able to be manipulated by politicians to maintain garrisons and to brain wash
people into voting one way regardless of how ruinous that way is to the
country. We must understand that education does for the brain what the spirit
does for the soul.
Without a good education system, then politicians will do
like Arnaldo did, rack up over a million dollars in phone calls. That couldn't never
happen in a Jamaica that is well educated. He would have to pay back that bill
and resign from Government forthwith. It’s not by chance why the investment in
education is so low, but by design. Let’s look at how the PNP wins election. The
PNP base is not the educated class but the poor uneducated, dependent people in
this country. Why is it that the PNP positions itself as the party of the poor?
If it should try to shift policies away from favoring the poor, it try to help
the poor it claims mostly through crash Program me and corruption, it will lose
the election. Now look at the polls, that is showing the PNP loosing popularity
with the Jamaican public, it Is because the PNP have been forced to abandon certain
things they would usually do to waste resources on keeping people poor and
dependent on the state, while having to structurally adjust the economy in a
way that has increased the suffering on the poor. And to make it worse the love
factor and the much talked about political capital that the Prime Minister has,
is no longer as potent as before.
Another point to note is how bad this country has done
economically. For most of this country lifetime, we have seen the economic
barely moving. The only time this country has seen any real growth is from the 50`s
through to 1972, when the PNP took power and destroyed the economic base of the
country by a whopping 25%. That means, if the economy was valued at 100 $ when
the PNP took power by the end of their tenure it valued only 75 $. What that
did was to wipe out a lot of the businesses that was here producing goods and
services that was been sold elsewhere thereby creating wealth. What about those
who claims the growth in the 60s was uneven and the poor was not benefiting? It’s
actually very simple. No country on earth that has been industrialized, has ever
found a way to actually distribute wealth evenly all at once. What happens is
that the wealth is accumulated by the Government in the form of taxes and then
spend it on welfare programs, education and other areas that compliments the
wages and salaries earned by people that are actually working. The object of
economic growth is to employ as much people as possible creating goods and
services and earning a salary. Economic growth is not predicated on making
everybody rich at once or at all but to make everybody have a chance to be
gainfully employed and to better themselves. Now once there is an expansion in
the economic base of the country, then employment is going to accrue. Those that
criticize the trickle down approach of industrialization should pay attention
to what has happen to every communist country on earth, they all have change
their economic foundation to capitalism in its full form, and have embraced the
trickle-down effect. What is important to note is that the object of capitalism
is not to make everybody rich but to create enough opportunities so everybody
have a chance to be well off. In the
words of Winston Churchill, communism virtue lies in the “equal sharing of
Misery.”
Now the PNP never got that but thought a
redistribution of wealth would be the answer to making everybody rich rather
than creating the conditions to enable people to work and produce wealth for
themselves and the country. We are still suffering from that nonsense today. The
80`s` brought back a recovery and Jamaica started to grow again. Then we had
the PNP back in power in the 90`s and set about systematically destroying the
economic base that the JLP built that was working. Again economic growth plummeted
and debt soared. The appetite for debt become so great that the productive
sector was once again marginalize and production slowed to a crawl. What became
important to the PNP was winning elections rather than governing properly, and in
the words of the Prime Minister at that time PJ Patterson:” this government has
presided over the most massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the
rich, since slavery was abolished.” What in effect he was saying is that he
govern this country in a way that benefits the rich at the expense of the poor.
What that has done is to create a set of disillusion
in the minds of the populace that has never been experienced since slavery was
abolished. We started seeing the rise in crimes, the rise in dons more than
before, and the disintegration of the society. As a Nation, we have seen
backward step after backward step that has plunged this nation further and
further down the abyss of nothing ness. It has inevitably created the idea that
politics does not work and there is but one step to take and that is to get
what wants here and now, even if it means murdering somebody to get it.
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