Jamaica and the World post COVID-19

DEVELOP JAMAICA INITIATIVE

It’s so unfortunate, myopic, and a demonstration of weak leadership for a government of a country gifted, anointed with extraordinary talents and leadership that have impacted and influenced the world in different generations, different disciplines, the likes of Marcus Garvey, Mary Seacole, Harry Belafonte, Bob Marley, Usain Bolt, and Shelly-Ann Fraser Pryce, to have to wait for a pandemic driving fear and uncertainty throughout the world, to have the government take a reactive posture and ask the people of the potentially great country of Jamaica “to come together” to overcome the possible devastation that could come from the COVID-19 virus. While not demonstrating the inclusiveness, the reaching out to the wide cross-sections of citizens, across political party lines, class lines, beyond cliquishness. Practicing TOGETHERNESS rather than just voicing it for convenience, great p.r. It’s a tragedy and comedy all rolled into one that neither Shakespeare or Sheridan could have imagined and written about. Pathetic!

For all of the 54 years of my professional life as a writer and journalist, I have consistently focused on the imbalance and injustice, the prejudice and hypocrisy, that have been stymieing real, true growth and development for Jamaica. This didn’t just come upon me “like that,” but from I can remember, my father, a Bustamante “Labourite,” instilled in me the role he and other young men, mostly, played in bringing about “modern Jamaica” stemming from the 1938 struggles perpetrated by port-workers, members of the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, and sugar cane workers, on the docks of Kingston, and in the farms in Westmoreland and St. Mary, led by St. William Grant, Alexander Bustamante, and Aggy Bernard, my dad told me. He being called to struggle, a young port-worker and from Islington, St. Mary, a Bustamante Industrial Trade Union member, seeking a better standard of living for himself and the emerging Jamaican working class. For him “the Chief” could do no wrong. 

While my mother cast her lot with the People’s National Party, because they had always “put education before everything” and a “chance for a better education for her only child” was what matters most to her. And they did deliver, as I “won a scholarship” from Elletson Government School to attend Kingston College, an Anglican ran high school founded by her bishop, Percival Gibson. For her, her “leader, Norman Washington Manley could do no wrong.” My parents had their disagreements mainly caused by my father’s philandering or not saving more of his earnings, but never about politics. And my parents lived and loved each other for over 40 years, till death did they part.

My understanding of world politics also came at a very early age, as my uncle who was also my godfather was Cuban, and next to boxing and baseball, what Castro was doing in Cuba was what he and his “compañeros” that had made Jamaica their home, talked about every time they met and I was fortunate to be present. And for my uncle, Fidel should not have taken the communist path, but life was far better under his leadership than what they had experienced under “Batista and Machado.” My uncle and his crew were black Cubans, with names like Laveist and Sanchez. 

My professional life therefore is informed and molded by a deep sensitivity to socio-economic development. From my earliest writings going back to 1966-67 in Jamaica appearing in The Gleaner, the Star, Public Opinion, The Abeng, Swing, and Cooyah magazines which included short stories and poems. In several articles published in the Gleaner and the In-Focus section of the Sunday Gleaner between 1989 and 2016, and in the Sunday Observer, and the Sunday Herald, I wrote extensively, and offered advice to the governments of Jamaica about taking a proactive and not a reactive approach to governance. I specifically zeroed in on socio-economic development. Urging the administrations, JLP and PNP, to make “affordable capital” available to a wider section of the Jamaican society, targeting development in the creative industries, agriculture, and agro-industry, bringing new players into the wealth-building pool. One article, “Food A Pillar for Jamaica’s Progress” February 19, 2012, In Focus, Sunday Gleaner, I wrote comprehensively on the importance of “food security” to nation-building and the potential of Jamaican mangoes as a great revenue generator for the Jamaican economy. It perplexed me that after writing from 1989 in the Daily Gleaner about the “hot water treatment” to rid Jamaican mangoes of the Mediterranean fruit fly disease which kept Jamaican mangoes out of the vast US market dominated by Mexico, Brazil and Haiti, that it was just over a year ago we heard that Jamaican mangoes were now able to enter “limitedly” the American market. Where is the leadership, public and private sectors, to take advantage of this opportunity to propel Jamaica in becoming a major supplier of mangoes to the U.S. and European markets?

In 2004, I presented a blueprint at a Downtown Kingston Rotarian Luncheon, in which I recommended a strategy to pursue development for Jamaica: THE DEVELOP JAMAICA INITIATIVE, to propel Jamaica from a US$6,000 GDP country to one generating three times more than that, placing the country into the “developed economies” category, as Singapore was able to accomplish. The initiative came out of years of exposure to business and politics in the U.S. and Jamaica. Between 1989 to 2004, as a member and consultant of the National Minority Business Council(NMBC) in New York City, I was involved in several trade and investment missions, four to Jamaica, that brought American investments into Caribbean countries, South Africa, and Great Britain targeting the “minority and women” business community in America for investments in those external markets. As it concerns Jamaica, we brought into Jamaica from the U.S. public sector, the U.S. Small Business Association, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, U.S. Department of Commerce, and New York State International Trade Administration. From the private sector, we brought from the U.S. several minority and women-owned businesses, along with Fortune 500 companies such as Pfizer Inc., the Walt Disney Company, ABC Inc., and the leading black business magazine Black Enterprise.

Among the accomplishments was having these investors visit and explore investments on the Jamaican Stock Exchange. It was due to my late wife’s cousin, Fritz-Earle McLymont, a man from Mocho, Clarendon, a member of the Golding family of Golding Printing Service, Swing magazine, and Swingdisk sound system fame, being a co-founder of the NMBC in 1972 to advocate for better business opportunities for black and other minorities owned businesses in America, that gave me the platform from which I was able to conceive the Develop Jamaica Initiative. I joined with them in 1978. In addition, my writings and ideas were guided by my entrepreneurial activities, with investments in cultural, agricultural, and agro-processing enterprises. I saw the potential of Jamaican mangoes in the U.S. market by getting a few boxes of Number 11 and hairy mangoes from Jamaica into the U.S. market and sold them to customers in Queens and Long Island, and selling Jamaican canned mango juice manufactured by a Jamaican company named Brico (Succs.) Ltd., to a heavy Pakistani and Indian market in Michigan. This was in the early 1990s. In my recently published novel, A Reason For Living set in Jamaica in the 1960s, an elderly American female character vacationing in Jamaica with her granddaughter at the ending of the revolution enters into conversation with one of the revolutionary leaders, they all staying at a small hotel in Falmouth, enquired of him what’s Jamaica’s future and what role could she and her rich industrialist American son play in that future, and his response to her was “agriculture.” That scene was written some 40 years ago.

Wayne Iton, general manager of the Jamaica Stock Exchange, center In white shirt, explains the running of the stock exchange to, from left, Anthony Veira, from Cleveland, Ohio, John Robinson, president of the NMBC, Monica Curry and Errol Mesquita of EIS Grip Technology in Hartford, Connecticut, and George Baines of DSU Training Institute in Houston, Texas. The U.S. participants in the trade and investment mission to Kingston, Jamaica visited the Exchange, in October 1998.

Prime Minister P.J. Patterson, center, listens as New York Congressman Charles Rangel, left, discusses possibilities of establishing a Kingston empowerment zone, with Julian “Jingles” Reynolds, NMBC consultant, at the annual Carib News Business Conference that brings together business leaders and politicians from the United States and Caribbean countries to explore strategies for improving economic conditions in the Caribbean region. It was held at the Wyndham Rose Hall in Montego Bay, St. James in November 2000.

Having presented the Initiative to ensuing Jamaican administrations, with none seeing its value and importance for sustainable long term development for Jamaica despite having a few so-called friends in both political parties, but receiving very supportive responses from the public at large, it was last presented in the In Focus section of the Sunday Gleaner, February 19, 2016. Below is the article.

Which would best serve Jamaica’s growth and development? 

· Published on June 12, 2016 By Julian "Jingles" Reynolds

(The following is the unedited version of my article that appeared in the Sunday Gleaner 6/12/2016)

As the Jamaica Labor Party administration unfolds its “economic growth and job creation” plan as the new government that will bring “prosperity” to an increasingly despaired Jamaican citizenry, I can’t help but feel that I am being robbed of my vision, my ideas, but instead of declaring the true value of what is being stolen, the administration is declaring a less value of the items being stolen or maybe borrowed, by implementing some half-stepping approaches to real economic development.

It never ceases to amaze how successive administrations of the Jamaica body politic, skirt the wholesome undertaking of applying growth and development to the Jamaican people in a manner to benefit the entire citizenry. It is always the top-down approach preferred over a systemic root up approach, to building the nation. “The Develop Jamaica Initiative” which I first introduced in 2004 at a Downtown Kingston Rotary Club luncheon takes the bottom-up approach. There are two fundamentals to this Initiative, access to affordable capital for entrepreneurs, businesses largely in the small, medium, and micro sectors, and experienced, organized management to penetrate global markets with the outputs from these beneficiaries of the financing from the DJI.

The new “prosperity” implementers talk about “for it to work all Jamaicans will have to be involved.” Have you heard anything so far that speaks to all Jamaicans in every nook and cranny of Jamaica, and throughout its diaspora having any participation in ownership or growth of this “new” Jamaican economy? Do you see anything on the immediate or even distant horizon that affirms your participation in the decision making to grow and develop the Jamaican economy? And let me again remind you that growth and development are not the same. As the distinguished Indian economist and philosopher, Amartya Sen states “economic growth is one aspect of the process of economic development." As I pointed out in a recent presentation, I made to the Rotarians at a luncheon at Hotel Four Seasons, there are several countries particularly in Africa that are showing growth but not development, which calls for both quantitative and qualitative gains. Growth, on the contrary, relies solely on quantitative indices. Growth favor mainly the big players in the economy, development incorporates the quality of life improvement for all citizens.

The People’s National Party administration lost the February general elections because it was unable to walk and chew gum, as the proverbial saying goes. It could not convince the people that the economic austerity they were being asked to endure, could have been tempered with some growth agenda that provides hope for a socio-economic uptick to their lives. They were so afraid that they employed the services of a Jamaican born woman, Maureen Denton, a leading corporate attorney from the U.S. to explore and establish their “growth agenda” but kept it a big secret. That even when the JLP announced their growth and job creation agenda, the PNP leadership kept mum with theirs.

I again state emphatically that the Develop Jamaica Initiative is the surest way to build a public-private sector approach to propel the Jamaican economy to the levels that it has the potential to achieve. It is again presented here. You decide if what the present administration is attempting, can match up to this….

The Develop Jamaica Initiative, recommends that the Government of Jamaica:

1.   Secures financing of (US)$200-300 million, to be raised through bond issues, inclusive of diaspora bonds, international grant-aid financing, and soft loans from the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and a consortium of international commercial banks. The capital raised is to be used solely for financing targeted developmental projects presented by entrepreneurs, established businesses, and new entities that have convincing proposals that show growth for the Jamaican economy. Investments and loans should not exceed US$6 million to any company. Provide an operating budget not exceeding US$5 million per annum to administer the Initiative.

2.   Establish an executive committee, a public-private sector partnership, to set policy and oversee the Initiative, chaired by the prime minister/minister of development, with one representative from each government ministry; and one representative each from the Opposition, Jamaica Manufacturers' Association, Jamaica Exporters' Association, Jamaica Chamber of Commerce, Jamaica Agricultural Society, Small Business Association of Jamaica, Jamaica 4-H Clubs, Scientific Research Council, Jamaica Bankers' Association, the Private Sector Organization of Jamaica, Small Medium and Micro Business Enterprise, the University of the West Indies, and the University of Technology. The committee is to meet once per month. Projects to be undertaken by the DJI must have a two-thirds majority vote of the committee.

3.   Establish a board of advisers comprising international expertise such as economist Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University; Dambisa Moyo, author, economist, and investment banker; economist Andrew Brimmer of Black Enterprise Board of Economists; Dr. William Spriggs, United States economist, and educator; Jamaica-born educators and social scientists Dr. Basil Wilson, former provost of John Jay College; economist and social scientist; Professor Don Robotham of City University of New York Graduate School; Ralston Hyman, broadcast journalist, and economist; corporate attorney Maureen Denton, the director of the Research Committee of Jamaica; international financier George Soros; Economist Dr. Peter Blair Henry; International Financier Eric-Vincent Guichard; and General Colin Powell, former US secretary of state. This body would meet annually over two days in Jamaica, chaired by the prime minister, and attended by the minister of finance and planning, and the executive director/development czar.

4.   Establish a management/administrative body headed by an executive director/development czar, supported by a staff. This position should be held by someone with vast business/industrial experience, experience working with the political system, and an unbending commitment and passion to transform Jamaica. The responsibilities of this body will be to vet the companies and projects to be funded by the DJI, recommend their selections to the DJI executive committee for final approval, and then guide the management of those chosen, towards profitability. Ideal candidates to head the DJI would be Douglas Orane, retired business executive; Claude Clarke, industrialist, and ex-Cabinet minister; Jimmy Moss-Solomon, retired business executive; Dr. Rosalea Hamilton, educator/manufacturer; Noel 'Tony' Hylton, retired industrialist; Omar Azan, manufacturer/industrialist; and Audrey Marks, business executive.

5.   Assemble a database of managers, marketing executives, lawyers, accountants, engineers, technicians, and executive assistants to be placed, when required, as consultants or temporary staff in companies provided with financing by the DJI. This expertise to be drawn heavily from the diaspora.

6.   Launch the DJI, inviting entrepreneurs and companies to present project proposals. Promote the Initiative globally through a website.

7.   Financing should be made primarily, but not exclusive to, targeted industries. Sectors targeted should be agriculture/agro-industry (fishing, food processing, nutraceuticals, essential oils), the entertainment industry (music, film and television, live performances,) tourism (emphasis on attractions and the rebirth of Kingston as a prime destination), alternative energy, information, and communication technology, mining, fashion, furniture, craft, health care, childcare, and sports. Emphasis is to be placed on research and development.

8.   Financing to be allocated through equity available via a facility established on the Jamaica Stock Exchange, or via a venture-capital facility. Financing is also to be allocated through low-interest loans, not exceeding an interest rate of nine percent, accessed through the Development Bank of Jamaica, the Export-Import Bank of Jamaica, commercial banks, people cooperative banks, and credit unions.

9.   The prime minister, in the capacity of chairman of the DJI, and the executive director/development czar will appear before Parliament once or twice per year, if so requested, to make a report on the operations of the DJI.

Copyright © Raymond A. Julian Reynolds, 2004

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The COVID-19 plague which has attacked mankind since December 2019 health-wise, economically, socially, bringing with it much anxieties and uncertainties, and clearly signaling the world that the social and economic practices that have dominated earth “runnings” for many centuries have failed, and is up for a change. The virus has made its demonic yet democratic approach very clear, non-discriminatory with whom it attacks, crippling world economics in less than three months, driving fear and anxiety into the president of the United States of America and his backers, and making it very clear like the song goes “a change is gonna come!” More anon.

In the mid-1970s, my wife then a student at City College, CUNY introduced me to Democracy For The Few by Michael Parenti, assigned reading for her political science class, a book I have quoted from in several articles, and highly recommend for those wanting to understand the machinations of the oligopoly state that runs the United States of America, and rules supreme worldwide. It is this that in my opinion, the COVID-19 plague is exposing as wrong and inappropriate for humanity in this time. The misery, the exploitation, the corruption, hypocrisy, injustice, inequality that capitalism, communism, and today’s neoliberalists have brought upon mankind over several centuries, demanded a “higher power” of action to right these centuries of wrongs, and force a more advanced, sincere, loving, equitable standard of living amongst mankind, As a child growing up in Jamaica and guided by Christian tenets, my parents warned me against mocking a handicapped person. It was an “unforgivable sin.” And so, when I saw the President of the United States of America ridiculing a physically challenged journalist, and his audience laughing, I knew America had reached one of its lowest points. It reminded me of the biblical stories of the Romans feeding Christians to the animals that the gladiators fought against in the arenas for entertainment. Some order was needed to overcome this baseness, this arrogance that had taken hold of America, and the world. I refer you to the bible “The love of money is the root of all evil….,” 1 Timothy 6:10. Repeatedly, the supporters of the crassness that have infiltrated the White House, immediately following one who many believe is one of the most “decent” “cultured” “intelligent,” “gentlemanly” presidents of the United States of America, and then to have immediately following him, someone who puts all his greatness in “what he will do for the economy,” and then cometh COVID-19 putting all of that into a tailspin, is not a coincidence. Trust me, it’s not. Though many of the neoliberalists, super-intellects, and those who put the purpose of church is to be a money-making machine for its leaders, will want you to believe so. But take heed of 1 Timothy 6:10. The suggestion of the U.S. President for people to ingest or inject disinfectant into their systems to prevent the invasion of the coronavirus is clearly an act of desperation to try and save his presidency as the virus threatens to seriously affect the American and world economies.

My late wife Charmaine Jasmine who died just over a year ago was a highly spiritual person, a nurse who insisted continuing work in a hospital in the South Bronx, though she could’ve earned a higher salary working in medical facilities elsewhere and closer to home, but she wanted to give her service to those who needed it most but could least afford it. She was diagnosed with lung cancer and battled it for nine years before succumbing. For 49 years of living together, we spoke about everything affecting the world. Our reasoning and working together began with the writing of the liner notes for GROUNATION album, the stellar production by Count Ossie and the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari in 1971. She also did African dancing with Cedric “Im” Brook’s and David Madden’s The Mystics and grew up as an across the street neighbor of the Rastafari master drummer Count Ossie, nurtured by the Rastafari community of Rockfort, at the foot of the Wareika Hill in east Kingston...  

She was very politically and culturally conscious, and believed that the vilest acts in human history for which debts remain outstanding are the Europeans who gave disease-infected blankets to the indigenous peoples of North, Central, and South Americas that decimated them and made it much easier to take their lands with gun power and brute force gaining the so-called “New World,” the enslavement of the black people of Africa, the remains of millions of them lying still at the bottom of the oceans, to work the lands that were taken from the Indians, the subjugation of the black people of South Africa by the Dutch and British, and the extermination of the European Jews by the Hitler regime was a “very wicked act,” but unfortunately not much was learned as the treatment of the Palestinians by the Jews over land historically belonging to both, remains a major contention. A favorite saying of hers was “if God was like man,” the retribution that would’ve been meted out.

Good leadership is noble, visionary, all-encompassing, empathetic, drawing on pragmatic solutions, but guided by spiritual awareness. The verse in the bible which reads, “Where there is no vision the people perish,” Proverbs 29:18 drives home the criticalness of leadership. In the late 1960s, I wrote an article appearing in the Star that began with that biblical passage. I was lamenting some 50 years ago that unsound socio-economic conditions existing in Jamaica. And the post-COVID-19 era will demand astute leadership with a paradigm shift in social, economic, and political thought and application. If not, the world will plunge into social unrest as the global impoverishes and substandard socio-economic conditions fail to stave off the viruses that attack mankind, as is happening now.

Jamaica must shake the colonialist, imperialist yoke that its leadership and so many other-like nations operate under. Wealth cannot continue to be built for the minority ruling class and cliques in these societies, at the debilitating expense of the vast majority providing cheap labor and living in deplorable conditions. What Jamaica and like societies are living under is arrested development dictated by external forces. The current COVID—19 experience is exposing this. Jamaica with its ecological wealth, natural resources, human capital, and creativity with a population of only three million and an active, proud, and committed diaspora, should have never been in the poor socio-economic condition it has found itself in. Wealth must be redistributed by making the productive sectors more accessible to non-traditional participants, some pursuing non-traditional industries, such as the creative industries. It’s noticeable that the two most important industries to the majority black Jamaicans, agriculture and entertainment, are the ones least attracting investments or loans from the financial sector. The annihilation of poverty must be the mantra for the new post-COVID-19 Jamaica. The national drive must be to increase productivity, generating more wealth for sustaining a better quality of life for all Jamaicans. I’ve been advocating this approach all my professional life, but I guess it’s counter to maintaining the status quo, which successive leaderships in the Jamaica body politic demonstrate is most important to them. One of the most appalling scenes I was exposed to at the heights of Portia Simpson Miller’s leadership was going into her constituency off Spanish Town Road at 3 P.M. on a Friday afternoon and see dozens of women gathered around tables gambling, with scores of children playing on the bad roads beside them.

I was so disappointed with Prime Minister Andrew Holness when I heard him announce in February that the monies gained from the sound fiscal management coming out of the IMF agreement initiated by the administration led by his predecessor Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller and concluded by his, would not be used for “social” programs like roads, water, medical facilities and equipment, and education, but his singular focus was paying down the national debt, little did he know what was around the corner. I considered his attitude arrogant, and insensitive to the dire needs throughout Jamaica for running water for better sanitation, better roads to get the farmer's agricultural products to market, improved health care, and better education for the poor throughout Jamaica. This is what The Develop Jamaica Initiative is about, building wealth to effect positive change to the benefit of the majority Jamaicans. The post-COVID-19 world will demand this. My papa would always tell me “De greatest thing in life is to know” and “De next most important thing is to be prepared.” Another of his favorite maxims was “De biggest problem in Jamaica is de guineagog dem who run de country don’t respect de small man, de working man, and woman of dis country.” While mama’s, a factory worker, firm belief is that “poverty is the biggest crime,” “you must see things before dem happen,” and “think before you speak.” I challenge the Jamaican government and the opposition to deploy The Develop Jamaica Initiative to save the Jamaican people, and for the people of Jamaica to see it done. The world will improve from this undertaking. The outstanding contributions made by the six Jamaicans mentioned in the beginning of this article was a revelation of the greatness that the little country of Jamaica had to offer to humanity, in entertainment, sports, civil rights, and better human conditions. It has so much more to offer with the right leadership to steer the course in post-COVID-19.

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