Dr Peter Phillips said that if we don’t pen an IMF deal soon then dog will nyam we super, Jamaica the beautiful land of sand, sea and sun is in deep financial problems.
These problems did not start over night it started over 20 years ago, with some serious bad management. When we had the financial meltdown in the 90’s the then PNP government implemented Finsac . What Finsac did was to wreck the production sector, it close down over 40,000 businesses and put thousands of Jamaicans out of a job.What happen next we started to borrow our way out, common sense tells us that if we are broke we have to sell our assets and borrow money to keep a float and that exactly what happen over the years. What we did with the money that we borrowed was to play politics with it; that money was not centered on production.
That’s what cause us to be in the situation that we are in today, in 2012 our total export was 1.6 billion US dollar and our imports was over 5 billion US dollars. In order to buy oil and other goods and services that the country needs, we have to raise the difference between what we earn and what we spend. What the government is trying to do is to borrow a loan from the IMF to fill that gap.
That is just putting a bandit over a cut, but at the end of the day the real problem is there. There is only two way out of this situation, is either we increase production or we cut out expenses drastically.
Jamaica have fertile soil we are bless with water and sun, we should use these resources to increase production. The government should invest a lot in agriculture because this sector can provide thousands of jobs and increase exports.
We have to train our work force so that they can be productive on the job, so that our economy can grow and we can earn our way out of our problems instead of borrowing.
