Ronald Thwaites | Paths to recovery?

Explain to us, simple folks, how economic recovery is engineered when probably half of our people have lost most everything and have no earnings to pay for food and provide shelter. Faced with this undeniable reality, government, albeit flush with relief foreign exchange (which ‘soon done’ – donor fatigue is real) dishes out hard currency each week to prop up the declining dollar.

What happens when trying to plug the leak in uncontrolled demand for greenbacks can’t be sustained?

Then, at the same time, billions of precious local savings which ought to be available for restoration and development are withdrawn by the Bank of Jamaica at an interest coupon to be borne by the very people, impoverished and now battered, who desperately need capital to recover. Investors respond by moving resources from fitful equities, to benefit from the safety and high return of government paper.

Meanwhile, try to source a home mortgage or an agricultural loan, nuh!

LEECHES

Again, I am reminded of how sick people used to have their life-sustaining blood leeched by doctors using parasites, in the vain conviction that losing what they needed most would restore them to health. It didn’t work. Patients died. Aren’t we doing a similar thing with our savings now?

MARKET FORCES

At the same time, imports, not just the food, building materials and medicines which should have been stockpiled months before for the inevitable breeze-blow, but everything a credit card can buy on Amazon and Temu, flood our ports at a cost four times the value of our mawga hard-currency earnings.

Are we to believe that this is the “market” working efficiently? Seems to me this is the con job of the colonial economy being perpetuated. The same people always get scarce resources to multiply their wealth at the expense of the perennial losers.

CURB THE SLIDE

Everybody is aware of the danger of a J$200: US$1 slide. Isn’t the cure for that to conserve hard currency for essentials, incentivising production and consumption of local production, particularly food, while repairing the four or five commodities and products which foreign markets want?

Where is the captivating national plan for any of this? Where is the robust discussion on the state and future of the economy?

This situation calls for the urgent replanting of every acre of edible crops and agricultural exports, putting people to work and ensuring maximum food sufficiency as soon as possible. Sweet potato and the new breadfruit variety grow faster than yam and are better for you than rice. Rabbit meat and beans require less foreign exchange than chicken. Turn disaster into an opportunity to change for the better. Spend on essentials - not more motor vehicles, horse hair and Christmas baubles.

ENABLE EDUCATION

Give school boards and principals supplier credit for between a half and two-thirds of what they need to repair their plants and get school going now. The strategy for resilience has to be localised, not centralised.

REFUGE

For many children, the school premises, probably having a little access to electricity, Internet and, hopefully, some food, is a welcome refuge from the devastation of home. To restore the routine of normal life, emotional stability and a restart of teaching and learning, even if not yet repaired, let schools open. This is an important time for ‘social’ education centred around the stories, strains, values and virtues arising out of personal and community peril. Cathartic and constructive.

POSTPONE EXAMS

After a month and more of enforced idleness, the majority of Jamaican children are in no position to be rushed into examination preparations. The usual timetables cannot stand. Classes must be extended at least through July 2026 so as not to short-change our youth. Maintaining the present schedule will mean diluting standards and unfairly adding to the stress of entire school communities.

We should have made this position clear to the Caribbean Examinations Council and City & Guilds. Jamaican students comprise large and very profitable cohorts to these institutions. They have banks of alternative question papers available which can be administered to our students many weeks later than customary, when candidates will have had time to settle down and properly prepare. The same is possible for the PEP exercise.

This will require education leaders to bestir themselves from their accustomed rhythms; stop finding a problem for every solution and really make pupil interests paramount. Will it happen?

ONE BIG ROOM

Given the devastation of nearly 200,000 homes by Melissa, it borders on criminal negligence that we are only now casting around for a strategy to rebuild sturdy, affordable homesteads. In recent years, capital and technology have poured into castles and skyscrapers for the monied class or substandard construction for the poorer class. Squatting proliferates, spawning every imaginable social and economic problem - all without a comprehensive solution.

More than 40 years ago, Anthony Michael Spaulding and Michael Manley envisaged the National Housing Trust and the Sites & Services project as complementary institutions for housing dignity for families with modest incomes.

BASIC UNITS

Try the container homes, if you must, but adapt the Sites & Services model for medium-term housing in the currently afflicted western parishes. Identify safe lands near townships, demarcate roads, survey house plots; introduce basic infrastructure, light, water, with a mandatory design plan for a single room and bathroom with a 100 per cent NHT mortgage for 40 years at nominal interest.

Supervise people building and eventually extending their own units. Arrange wholesale price access to basic building materials. Link beneficiaries to credit unions which can finance other home amenities. Then, watch how hitherto dispossessed people will shed their gully-bank habits. Once given title, families will customise their own homes and enter the formal economy with an efficiency and alacrity which the State can never match.

NEW LEARNING

On December 2 at 2 p.m. at St George’s College, businessman Donovan Lewis will share the lessons of his career path with 6th formers from Corporate Area schools. Hearing and questioning professionals affords students a learning opportunity superior to any lecture or textbook.

People learn from stories especially when linked to specific personages. I am hoping this style of pedagogy will become a regular bridge between formal education and the talents of the entire productive sector. Kudos to the Knights!

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