Norris R. McDonald | Jamaica’s NHT: Black pride to government ‘piggy bank’

“Where there is no vision, the people perish!”

That biblical warning echoes the philosophy of our National Hero, the Right Excellent Marcus Mosiah Garvey. Today, it stands as a haunting indictment of Jamaica’s political leadership and its surrender to foreign financial power.

Public management of Jamaica’s affairs appears to be shifting from one crisis to another. Two glaring signs of this are the persistent need to borrow at high interest rates and the use of workers’ hard-earned savings in the National Housing Trust (NHT) as the government’s private piggy bank.

LOANS, DEBT AND THE NHT PIGGY BANK

In what seems like an act of financial desperation, the government borrowed another US$1 billion, worsening Jamaica’s long-standing debt burden. The fact that the administration stubbornly continues down this path leads directly to a situation in which the NHT is treated as a piggy bank to be raided.

The “budget hole” or financial shortfall I warned about is now worsening to the point where the government is forced to cut public spending, borrow foreign money, and raid the NHT.

I warned the country last year in my September 3, 2025, Gleaner article, Ratios to Reality: Bread, Butter, Taxes and the Keith Duncan Paradox, that “the only way to plug Jamaica’s budget deficit was to address the structural drain of our rising food import bill.”

As I predicted then, in the absence of a sharp curb on food imports, that US$1 billion leakage will continue. Is it mere chance or coincidence that this exact US$1 billion is being borrowed from American bankers to patch the shortfall?

A CLEAR ABSENCE OF TRUST AND SOUND MORAL LEADERSHIP

In a September 9, 2026, filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (Prospectus 424B5) to borrow US$1 billion at a 6.25 per cent interest rate, the government stated: “the full faith and credit of Jamaica is pledged.”

What does it mean to ask foreign capital markets to trust you while simultaneously betraying the trust of black working-class citizens by raiding their hard-earned savings?

The administration is borrowing money, sharply cutting spending and, most disastrously, raiding the NHT. This is happening at a time when Hurricane Melissa victims desperately need help.

In the meantime, more than 250,000 people remain without proper shelter because of Jamaica’s persistent shortage of low-income housing. This housing crisis is so severe that, in some communities, poor black Jamaicans are still kotching wherever they can find shelter, with some reduced to sleeping inside cemeteries, on rough gravestones, or building lean-to huts.

THE HUMAN COSTS: EMPTY POTS AND RUN-DOWN HOSPITAL WARDS

A nation’s progress must be measured by the positive impact of public policy on people’s lives. A secure roof over their heads, food on the table, quality education, and accessible healthcare are the core pillars of social and economic upliftment.

The human toll is staggering:

• Food insecurity: Alarming United Nations data shows that 55.1 per cent of Jamaicans face food insecurity, with nearly 28 per cent experiencing severe hunger, going entire days without eating or skipping meals altogether.

• Healthcare collapse: We are still reeling from a severe, unresolved health crisis marked by a shocking spike in newborn deaths at Victoria Jubilee Hospital (VJH), where 229 neonatal deaths occurred between October 2023 and June 2025, with no transparent solution in sight.

This damning medical indictment points directly to rampant maternal malnutrition, systemic poverty, and severe maternal stress as the root causes destroying our children before they even reach the delivery ward.

Political survival in this volatile context has led the administration to a domestic betrayal: turning the NHT into a desperate lifeline for a government tethered to the edge of fiscal collapse.

THE NHT IS A DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST LEGACY

Conceived as a pillar of social justice and democratic socialist empowerment under Michael Manley, the NHT is a sacred institution built from the wages of Jamaican workers.

The NHT emerged in 1976 to help working-class and middle-class Jamaicans own homes and build family wealth. Homeownership meant more than shelter; it meant dignity, independence, and a stake in the nation’s future.

Under Housing Minister Anthony Spaulding, land reform and housing development became powerful tools of social justice. Later, P.J. Patterson and Portia Simpson Miller advanced these community development programmes, earning international praise.

In a landmark 1996 Inter-American Development Bank study, Marlene Smith hailed Jamaica’s NHT as “an innovative model for low-income housing”.

RECLAIMING GARVEY’S BLACK VISION

My dear friends, this government’s present approach in changing the NHT’s mission not only undermines Michael Manley’s vision, but is also contradictory to Marcus Garvey’s call for black self-reliance and economic development.

True nation-building requires addressing the root causes of Jamaica’s economic crisis. This includes the failure to have a sustainable energy security policy to reduce high fuel import costs. It also requires aggressively investing in agriculture to slash the nation’s food import bill.

If economic development doesn’t lift everyone up, it is nothing more than a shield for institutional failure. Today, Jamaica’s poorest families are locked out of national progress, while a system of bureaucratic box-checking protects the elites who run it.

To fix this, we have to stop playing by the rules of external technocrats and domestic elites. For too long, their policies have treated ordinary citizens like disposable cogs in a machine. We need to break free from this cycle of dependency and reclaim the fearless, self-reliant spirit of Marcus Garvey and our ancestors.

If we don’t change course right now, regular Jamaicans will continue paying the price for this systemic betrayal. You can already see the cost today in skyrocketing electricity bills, raided savings accounts, empty cooking pots, and hungry children.

The government routinely assures foreign lenders that Jamaica will honour its financial obligations down to the last cent. But what of its sacred moral obligation to the hardworking black Jamaicans whose weekly statutory contributions sustain the NHT?

Just as the government pledged to foreign lenders that they can trust it, it must first rebuild trust with the Jamaican people by not using the NHT as a budget-supporting “piggy bank”.

That is just the ‘bitta truth’.

Norris R. McDonald is an author, economic journalist, political analyst, and respiratory therapist. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and miaminorris@yahoo.com.