EDITORIAL - Why Jamaica should take note of Egypt

IT
WOULD be easy for our Government, and Jamaicans generally, to assume
that there are no parallels between the violent uprising in Egypt
against the long-serving President Hosni Mubarak, or the revolt in
Tunisia that chucked out the dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.

Nor
might we see a congruence between anything in Jamaica and the events in
Yemen, where President Ali Abdullah Saleh is under pressure from
demonstrators; nor Algeria, where Abdelaziz Bouteflika has announced
that a 20-year-old state of emergency is to be lifted.

Nor
would Jamaica expect to be classified with Jordan, with its limited
constitutional rule and where real power rests with King Abdullah III.

After
all, Jamaica, its social malaise notwithstanding, is a functional
democracy with high levels of individual freedom and the right of people
to elect their government at intervals, although the process sometimes
gets rather messy.

This
newspaper, however, believes that as Jamaica watches the deepening
unrest in North Africa and the Arab world, it is serious cause for
concern. For while the proximate cause of the uprisings - Ben Ali,
Mubarak and Co - may be to throw off repression in favour of democracy,
the underlying issues are much deeper.

disenchanted young people

They
are as much social and economic as political, and have been driven,
primarily, by disenchanted young people. And therein lies our parallel.

Ben
Ali, for instance, found it relatively easy to maintain social
stability when his country's economy was in reasonably decent health.
Things, however, have gone sour, and domestic economic problems have
been aggravated by the global crisis. Political discontent has been
exacerbated by high levels of joblessness and underemployment,
particularly among young people.

In
essence, the crises faced by youth in the North African and Arab states
are not dissimilar to those highlighted by social anthropologist
Professor Don Robotham in last Sunday's edition of this newspaper, and
upon which we commented in the same issue.

urgent and robust attention

There
are some harrowing facts worth recalling: nearly 400,000 people in the
15-29 age group - 59 per cent of the cohort - are either unemployed or
out of the labour force. Of this group, 83 per cent have stopped looking
for work, most likely because they believe that there are no jobs to be
found.

Fixing
problems such as these is never easy, but they always demand urgent and
robust attention, which Prime Minister Bruce Golding and his Jamaica
Labour Party promised would be the case when they came to office more
than three years ago.

We
have, however, neither felt nor seen the urgency of an administration
that is driving hard for economic growth and giving substance to its
promise of job creation. It has mostly pursued a predictable economic
orthodoxy of the recent past, with little embrace of a real partnership
with the private sector to jump-start and rev the economy.

Early
in its tenure, this newspaper suggested to the administration the need
for something akin to a job council, similar to the one US President
Barack Obama appointed recently with General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt
at the helm. We recommitted to the idea at the time of Mr Immelt's
appointment and do so again.

We
don't assume that Mr Obama has greater insight than our prime minister,
unless the US president has a better grasp of Middle East matters.

The
opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect
the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us:
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