Kristen Gyles | Budget speeches, election promises and trust issues

The ongoing Budget Debate would be more correctly classified as a series of election speeches. Election promises left, right and centre – many of which extend far beyond the 2025/2026 Budget. A few comments:

The Opposition has been doing something the government hasn’t been doing – listening. While the finance minister’s speech was good, the opposition leader’s speech was a direct response to many of the issues Jamaicans have been ventilating in recent years. He could not have articulated much better than he did, the problem young Jamaicans are facing with securing affordable housing, and the proposed reforms to the National Housing Trust (NHT) intended to solve the problem.

Mark Golding says the People’s National Party (PNP), if elected, will establish a young owners’ deposit fund of $1 billion within the NHT, to allow people under 35 who have been NHT contributors for two or more years to access $500,000 towards their housing deposits. He also spoke to a reduction in NHT interest rates for public sector workers. How? He says he will end the practice of government drawdowns on the NHT’s profits, which currently amount to $11.4 billion annually. The goal, he said, is to bring the NHT back to its initial mandate of providing affordable housing for contributors. These reforms alone, could be the PNP’s winning ticket, because there is hardly a greater topic of interest to the average working-class Jamaican.

INTERESTING ANNOUNCEMENTS

The opposition spokesperson on finance (OSF) made some interesting announcements as well. He said the PNP intends to extend the post-graduation moratorium for SLB loan payments by an additional six months. Again … they are listening. Instead of the usual self-aggrandising over a super-duper low unemployment rate, the government should have, by now, acknowledged that more needs to be done to ease the burden of tertiary graduates who take years just to get settled into jobs that make real sense.

Another major highlight from the OSF’s speech is that with Bank of Jamaica’s policy interest rate having been on the decline for a few months now, bank lending rates have hardly budged. To address the perceived failure in the monetary transmission mechanism, he announced plans to improve competition in the banking sector. The plan is to auction the government’s deposits, the vast majority of which currently go to the two largest commercial banks, and which altogether account for 10 percent of the total deposits across the banking sector. The proposal allows all deposit-taking institutions to compete for government deposits, giving smaller banks a greater chance of accessing these funds, which could put them in a better position to reduce lending rates.

So, clearly, the Opposition hinted at some good proposals. However, in some cases they were a little too vague to be credible. For example, one of the several reforms announced by the OSF in relation to the Students’ Loan Bureau is the intention to allow borrowers to renegotiate their loan repayment amounts based on their income level. More details were needed there.

I also found myself hungry for more details listening to the description of the EASE (Ensuring Adequate Sustenance for Education) programme. EASE centres around plans to provide one nutritious meal per day to all needy students. The OSF hastened to acknowledge that while meals are provided to students on the PATH programme, far more students than those who qualify for PATH are in need. Having said that, we were left to figure out who needy students actually are and how many such students (beyond those who qualify for PATH) actually exist to benefit from EASE.

IRON OUT DETAILS

What is respectable is that the PNP is not trying to convince us of what the problems are. They are allowing us, the ones facing the problems, to tell them what the problems are. What they need to do now is iron out more of the details surrounding their solutions.

To broaden the discussion here a bit, what exactly are the reforms needed for the education sector? Neither side of parliament seems to have an answer. In explaining the 4E strategy for building a stronger economy, the OSF spoke about the need to redirect funding towards the early childhood and primary levels “where it can make the greatest impact”. Is it for want of money that early childhood and primary education are weak? At the early childhood level, for example, academics doesn’t extend far beyond learning the alphabet, basic phonics and counting. The really, really advanced three-year-olds can add single digit numbers. Facilitating this learning does not require highly specialised expertise or high-tech equipment, so what exactly are we shifting resources to do? Again … we need details.

What was interesting though is that just three days after the OSF’s speech, Damion Crawford, who is likely to be appointed education minister under a PNP government, announced plans for his party to provide a scholarship to the first child in every family to get into ‘the university’. How exactly is this going to be achieved while shifting money from the tertiary and secondary levels to early childhood and primary? With perennial strikes and sick-outs by university lecturers and sky-high university fees, it is clear that there is already a shortage of funds at the tertiary level. Now, the PNP wants to reduce the funding to tertiary institutions while promising one tertiary scholarship per household? Let’s be real.

The promises are certainly appealing, but Jamaicans now have trust issues. First, because both sides of parliament have let us down many times. Second, because a man who can’t afford his supermarket bill can promise to take you out to dinner, but it doesn’t mean he will be the one paying for the meal.

Kristen Gyles is a free-thinking public affairs opinionator. Send feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com