Ronald Thwaites | Kemar’s fate

How long can we can go on ignoring the new reality? Backra Massa has declared about the plantation next door, “I can do anything I want with Cuba”. It won’t take much for that conviction to extend to the fraidy-fraidy island in sight of Guantanamo, if we just seh feh. Or even if we don’t.

House slaves never had to do wrong to deserve a beatin’. Displeasure which can screw up visas or remittances can be caused by any pretext – or none. No matter how we kin teet.

Some who have despaired of, or never committed to, the independence project will feel reassured or vindicated. Members of my family and church, scared of another Haiti, wept at the departure of Edward John Eyre, despite the fact that he had murdered a kinsman without a fair trial. Our state apparatus is still doing that today.

The rest of us will bend our backs under the extortionate gas and electricity prices. PetroCaribe Two? Faghet it! Even if we find offshore oil, working class Jamaicans won’t get much out of it under the present system. When the owner man is running a 30+ (and counting) trillion-dollar unpayable debt borrowed from other nations’ savings, the niceities of Caribbean needs and sovereignty don’t apply.

Miss Lou might have entertained us by noticing colonisation in reverse. What faces the Caribbean, whose effective unity we foreswore in 1962, is the 21st century version of clientilism and recolonisation – this time with no Whitehall to pick up the tab. All the pretty-pretty budget promises are unlikely of fulfilment. The tax money is going to be short, after strong-arming us to expel the Cubans, the Americans will soon frown on us for heavy reliance on Chinese workers and capital who have become the lynch-pin of physical development. The majority of us will continue to earn US$2.50 per hour.

PRODUCTIVITY?

Failing to improve total factor productivity, and especially labour output measured in relation to wages, will be the worst default if we allow it to continue. I admired the prime minister’s concentration on this in last week’s Budget address, and noted also the waffling response from the trade union leadership who seem to have a problem for every solution to this stubborn issue.

The spectre of a raging bull rampaging through pretensions of small island sovereignty should make us concentrate soberly on the range and possibilities of our resources. Sugar and bananas are dead. Bauxite extraction is self-poison. Like Cuba and Singapore, the upliftment of our human resources provides the most sacred and sustainable option for development.

The only way Jamaica can escape being in thrall to the northern juggernaut (or anyone else) is to be able to better pay our way, feed ourselves and educate our population to the highest levels of humane and professional skills.

The proposal to use the big money at HEART/NSTA Trust to fund near universal apprenticeship with appropriate supervision and certification is excellent but difficult to implement. First, it will mean dismantling the HEART bureaucracy which has enormous political implications. Next, who wants apprentices with limited literacy, numeracy and social skills?

The Jamaican economy remains premised on low-skilled labour. A minority of workers are usefully certified, three quarters of a million are outside of the labour force but have to eat and supposedly thrive. 60% of school leavers must either hustle or migrate in mostly vain hopes of flourishing.

This is the crucial problem which the budget debates and state policy have failed to confront adequately. We spend the money but don’t get the results, kill some more, offer others circus instead of bread, and declare “prassperty”. Any wonder the country is fraught with more cynicism than hope and more prone to cleave to autocratic boops than to genuine “chief servants”, as Bruce Golding once described his role?

KEMAR’S PERIL

Kemar is a pre-teen who, like probably 20 per cent of his peers, is somewhere on the spectrum of learning and behavioural challenges. Unable to sit still for long, constantly distracted; schooled to be a bully by the bullying he has been subjected to, frequently suspended from school, he teefs lunch money from weaker students because it has been done to him so often.

Unwittingly, he is holding back the rest of his class, frustrating his teacher, headed for a life of underperformance, or worse, if left unassessed and untreated. He is likely to become a contributor to low productivity, a parent who can’t cope, either a victim of, or a producer of, violence, no matter how many like him the State slaughters.

My worst experiences as an inner-city political representative was to meet a 22-year-old grandmother and a grandfather, his son and their adult grandson, none of whom had ever had a steady job.

Given the political economy which we tolerate, I was unable to offer them little more than a bushing work, a US visa application fee, and a small money to set up a bag juice business.

Kemar’s classroom, like almost every other in Jamaica, needs retrained teachers, a teaching assistant to pull out kids with learning and behavioural challenges, a strict attendance policy backed by truancy officers and social workers, and a Mississippi-strength resolve not to promote children by age but rather by capacity and competence.

Where is any of that in this Budget? In the sectoral debate, please speak of a covenant to improve foundational education before any chat about Artificial Intelligence and the nauseous repetition promising invisible STEM academies.

Mercifully for him and us, Kemar is now getting attention through voluntary assistance to be properly evaluated, treated and supported. Do we really believe that no child should be left behind? If so, what about the others like him?

Teacher Allen and Teacher Cooke are watching.

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