Edward Seaga, Contributor

My regular Sunday column has not been published for the past four weeks because I set myself a self-imposed deadline of completing the first 200 pages of my autobiographic work, which I started in July. This having been completed, I can now return to my column since what remains is another 50 or more pages to be done by the end of February to complete volume one.

The complete work will span 500-600 pages, in two volumes, without dealing with my political career, which is to be treated separately. So too is the economy of Jamaica. These are separate, but companion volumes.

I call it an autobiographic work, rather than an autobiography, because I am in the fortunate position of having experienced nearly all of the period since 1938 in one way or another giving me, for the great part, a public position in the historic experiences of the time, rather than a personal one.

Recollections from childhood in 1938 were an insightful part of my experiences. As was the construction of my family tree for which I drew heavily on the considerable work of other family members who have studied intensely our ancestral lineage back to the 11th century. My family tree covers four continents - Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas.

In my presentation, I position myself as one who is giving an account of the passage of history around me. Because of the positions I held over the period, inevitably, I cannot escape being a central figure for nearly five decades.

It is my intention to make this work as dispassionate and non-partisan as possible. I owe it to the nation to create a work that will be strictly informative without any partisan slant since I was in the unique position of being able to look down and around on the passage of history for over 70 years.

I have already found some unexpected revelations about myself and others, which have enriched my understanding of the past, and I have not yet completed the decade of the 1960s.

I am also hoping to provide a different analytical path for interpretation of the Jamaican economy compared to the standard treatment offered by the IMF/World Bank Washington Consensus. Most certainly, there will be some new reasoning, which could provide answers for old problems.

Being on the outside looking in really provides a clearer picture once the political screen is out of the way. In fact, while political life has been a rich and invaluable experience, it is not a good platform if it is the only base of information.

The opposite is also true. I have read statistical analyses, which fall far short because they do not have that deeper background of the political perspective. It takes both approaches to get a full understanding.

Rapid pace

I have been able to work at a rapid pace because so much of the information is readily available from memory. But memory alone is not sufficient. In fact, it is dangerous to rely solely on memory. Hence, I have undertaken a project to scan what has now grown to be some 600,000 pages of documents, which comprise the collection of my personal papers. After scanning, the papers are stored in digital format by a special computer programme which allows retrieval of any item, as well as a recovery of all items of the same title or same subject matter, in a single search. This invaluable computer exercise speeds up the research process.

The project is to digitalise all the data, except books, reports, periodicals and journals. These are recorded by titles and key phrases. Also excluded are about 20 mega-albums, 36 x 24 inches each, with press clippings from the overseas press in the 1980s, numbering a few thousand entries.

In addition to the printed material, there are close to 750 audio-visual tapes and disks and some audio material as well. Then, there are numerous boxes of photo albums and loose photographs.

All these create a massive database of tremendous value to me and others who will share it when it has been completed.

This project was made possible by a grant from Culture, Health, Arts, Science and Education Fund (CHASE) under the chairmanship of the Hon. Carlton Davis, who fully understands the historical value of these records. It will take two or three more years to complete this historical exercise, but this does not matter as it will be of considerable value to generations for centuries to come.

The lack of knowledge of Jamaican history is a great tragedy. It creates a rootless society. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the gap of knowledge, which exists on recent Jamaican history of the past 70 years. Even Independence, a mere 44 years ago, is largely a blank except for the relatively few who have lived the experience, or who have studied the period, despite the paucity of available records.

Ignorance helps to create myths from mischief and misunderstanding. In the absence of truth, these soon become the living truth. It is vital, therefore, to understand the realities of historical occurrences in order to inform the present and guide the future.

As a prime victim of misunderstanding and mischief, I am more often depicted for what I am not, than for what I am, for several reasons; one of the most prominent of which has been the lack of publicity which I neglected to give to some of my major programmes, leaving a vacuum of information. I was shocked to find that information on one of my most successful and an important achievement, Jamaicanisation of the financial system, does not exist even as a ministry paper in Parliament, nor was it debated in the House of Representatives, nor was it in the press.

It was done without any fanfare, yet it was one of the most important developments of the post-Independence era in which the nearly 100 per cent foreign ownership of all our financial institutions (banks, insurance companies, etc.) was reversed, providing significant Jamaican participation in ownership in the banking system and almost full Jamaican ownership of the insurance industry, a virtual 180 degree turn around in a relatively short three years.

This took place between 1968-71 with the cooperation of the foreign-owned financial institutions, using moral suasion. If this transformation had not taken place smoothly in the 1960s, guess what would have happened in the 1970s? Well, it happened anyway, in the 1990s when 40 Jamaican financial institutions collapsed leaving only one or two Jamaican institutions standing in place, thus coming full circle back to where we had started.

Political identity

The episode of Jamaicanisation helps to deal with one other problem, I frequently experienced - my own political identity. I have been called a socialist, a statist and a capitalist, as if these are either/or positions on the ideological scale. For most people who follow doctrine, for me it is possible to have more than one persona in the same ideological corpus. My approach to ownership of financial institutions is a perfect example.

I established the Jamaica Unit Trust in 1971, as a new type of financial institution for investors to own equity with less risk. I did so as a publicly owned corporation, because it was necessary to foster this type of institution to attract smaller investors and the private sector would not venture in that direction.

Similarly, the establishment of the Jamaica Mortgage Bank in 1972 was as another publicly owned financial institution because there was little appreciation in the private sector for a secondary mortgage facility. Today, the Jamaican Unit Trust, having proved its worth, has been rightly privatised and several others have now been established in the private sector.

The Jamaica Mortgage Bank is still a publicly owned institution because it cannot perform its mission in an environment of high interest rates. (There is a solution to that problem, which I will address at another time).

So does this mix of private and state ownership fostered in one policy regime applicable to the development of financial institutions, make me socialist/statist or capitalist? The answer is I am a pragmatist, who knows when the private sector is a ready driver, but also when the state must be a catalyst by owning, developing and divesting.

Many countries in the world today, which are still groping to find an appropriate development strategy, are trending in this direction of mixing and matching their policies of ownership of assets according to the best options available in the public interest.

I set this out clearly so that my position in history may be based on a proper understanding of my pragmatic approach rather than dogmatic compunction. My belief system is not ideologically based. More simply, I am guided by the tenet: if it can work and serves a good purpose, do it; if it cannot, drop it.

Edward Seaga is a former prime minister. He is now a distinguished fellow at the UWI. Email: odf@uwimona.edu.jm.