Politics captured by incompetents
Published:Sunday | January 23, 2011 | 12:00 AM
Arthur Hall, Senior Staff Reporter
Businesswoman and former head of the Jamaica Manufacturers' Association (JMA), Doreen Frankson, is blaming incompetent politicians, past and present, for the economic woes facing the country.
She also chided fellow private-sector leaders and other middle-class Jamaicans for their failure to participate fully in the political process.
"Let us evaluate the people we are electing. Eighty per cent of them ought not to be sitting in the House of Parliament," Frankson told a recent Gleaner Editors' Forum.
"We in the business class and in the middle and upper classes have abandoned the political process and have allowed it to be captured by people who really do not have the competence to do much more than they are doing," a fiery Frankson added.
She claimed that for many years, Jamaican manufacturers have been operating in an environment where the Government has not provided the proper support or policy mix.
Jamaican exports
In 2009, Jamaican manufacturers exported goods valued at US$723 million while employing 77,000 people, and contributed approximately eight per cent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).
That was a far cry from the 1980s when the manufacturing sector employed more than 120,000 persons and contributed 20 per cent to GDP.
The decline has been blamed on several factors, including the high cost of electricity, crime, a complex tax system, a lack of support for locally made products, and Frankson believes a crisis of leadership should be added to that list.
She has the support of former president of the Montego Bay Chamber of Commerce, Lloyd B. Smith, who argued that the political leaders do not know how to provide support for the productive sector.
"What we have is a political economy. That is an economy that very largely has to depend on the decisions of persons, many of whom have never run a business successfully," Smith told the Editors' Forum at the Gleaner's central Kingston offices.
"And that is part of the tragedy of our political system," said Smith, who once unsuccessfully contested a general election on a Jamaica Labour Party ticket.
He said a reconstruction of the political system through constitutional reform would be necessary for Jamaica to move forward.
But Marlene Street-Forrest, general manager of the Jamaica Stock Exchange, argued that there was also a dearth of leadership in the private sector.
"One of the things that I think is lacking is leadership. It is leadership at the government end and also in the private sector," Street-Forrest told the Editors' Forum.
She said there was a desperate need for more cooperation between leaders in the public and private sector to move Jamaica forward.