Ronald Thwaites | Tuffy and Richard

Last week we buried Lorraine. She was only 47, racked with cancer. Her pet name was ‘Tuffy’. Her name fitted her nature. It had to. Hers is the story of the lived experience of Jamaicans. Tough – but noble. She was the consummate hustler, prepared to do anything lawful and semi-lawful so as to take care of her two children and her friends. Seated with her tray outside the school gate for a couple hours during term time, she was listed as ‘employed’, although for all of her 30 working years she had never earned a liveable wage.

Last week, too, Richard Byles told the truth to a nation which likes to deceive itself that if wages for people like Tuffy rise above the inflation rate, absent an increase in productivity , inflation, that most cruel tax on the poor, will spiral again. And what a ‘bam-bam’ that statement has caused!

Although sad, it’s perhaps a blessing that Lorraine has died. She would doubtless have been among the two million of us who, despite all the promises and years of “ban yu belly”, the “better mus’ come” has never come. Neither the absurdity of ‘prassperty’. Tuffy was eulogised at her funeral as having to fend for herself early in life. Her upbringing boxed between ghetto life in town and dirt-poor relatives in the country when urban conditions became really rough.

HOLD STRAIN

Mr Byles says total factor productivity has been declining by about one per cent annually, so wages must hold strain until God comes. He couldn’t be talking about our Tuffy, though. She was one of the most resourceful, hard-working, perpetually ‘bruk-pocket’ people I have ever known. Whatever very limited formal schooling she got melded with her PhD in street smartness to produce miracles of informal goods and services to sustain her family and some “wutlis man dem”. Any dollar she got never depreciated – it multiplied.

At 18 years old, she did the only thing her culture and nature had taught her to do – make a baby. There were two children; no mention of their father or hers. But Lord, how these two respectable adults sang the praises of their mother! Still it was an avoidable strain. What a difference it made when about five years ago, Tuffy linked up with a gentleman who shared with her and cared for her right to the end.

I wonder if when Richard Byles and the rest of us high-ups get around to stimulating productivity, we will acknowledge how fundamental a stable family life is to the process; and community and the discipline of religion.

Monetary policy is the Bank of Jamaica’s remit. But look sharp how all the commentary has been about the insensitivity (sic, PSOJ) of the utterance and hardly a word about the ingredients and imperatives of increasing productivity, especially labour productivity. Instead, our leaders continue to lead us in expensive denial.

Consider education, the primary ingredient of producing higher-value goods and services. The transformation process is languishing, while teachers are leaving in such numbers that the minister has lost count.

Although they did their best for her at public health facilities, Tuffy, like countless others had, to wait and wait for the treatments she needed when the machines didn’t work and the nurses followed the teachers.

Are the big, big salary raises for the public servants, the BOJ and the Gordon House people leading to increased efficiency and less corruption? There is no sign of that.

PERSISTENT POVERTY

If we continue along the present path of political economy, so many of our people will continue to live in ‘persistent poverty’.

Lorraine was my friend. She shared everything she made or found – a gizzada, a piece of pinda cake, guineps or a red apple. In return, there was so little I could do to relieve her condition.

When the cancer invaded, she never became bitter. She had been baptised and was consoled by the community of her church. The germ of faith, rather than sight, had always guided her life. She had no forked tongue, and I preferred her challenging company to the fashionistas and self-obsessed of the social elite.

If we had cared to, Jamaica could have done so much more to make her life, and ours, more fruitful.

We could strongly promote stable family life, married or not, rather than continue to suggest that casual childbearing has little social and economic consequences. It is worth repeating: the most enduring shackle of slavery has been the disrespect to African family structure. That the neoliberal West is promoting family fluidity as an essential freedom and we are sucking it up, is increasing our peril.

If Tuffy’s school had the resources to offer her more certification, she would have been way more productive in the formal economy than among the 40 per cent on the margins. It still doesn’t.

Then, if some of the inexhaustible capital available to build $50-million, one-bedroom apartments had been available to bring simple dignity to her ‘wapp’n bapp’n’ in Allman Town (as promised years ago), she would have paid back every cent advanced and been able to structure her life more productively.

None of these things are beyond our capacity and resources right now. Lorraine’s struggle is over. What can the BOJ and the rest of us learn from her story?

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at the UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.