Orville Taylor | DNA: nature vs nurture

It is not that simple. How does one determine who the real parent of a child is, especially when she is collecting her award at graduation? Is it the biological or the one who raised her? Indeed, DNA is dynamic. Therefore, environmental factors can trip some genes on or off.

Four spokespersons from Parliament entered into a master debate as they battled for the sympathies and index fingers of the electorate. A general election is due soon and Don Anderson polls indicate that were it called now; it will likely be a narrow victory for the People’s National Party (PNP). But elections are won on the day, and as stated multiple times, it is possible to win the national vote, and still lose the election.

Success and failure are been passed across the aisle, like a ‘raffled’ child named ‘Awhofa’. Both the PNP and governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) say our economic stability is their progeny. DNA analysis is not as conclusive as one would think.

Jamaica is neither a failed state, nor failed economy. True, we have seen three consecutive quarters of economic contraction. Moreover, although accurately measured using methodologies honed by sociologists and demographers, the low unemployment rate obscures unemployment, and does not capture the working poor.

SOBERING ACT

Here is a sobering fact. There can be no boasting by any of the two parties in Parliament about the overall stewardship of the economy by either the incumbent or previous administrations by that party or the Opposition.

There is enough blame to go around, because the people have been very promiscuous and have allowed multiple men to make fool of them, after promises of doing better than the other man, and the cycle continued for more than 80 years after universal adult suffrage.

Starting at independence, the fabled period of the 1960s, saw sustained economic growth and expansion. Led by initiatives from Industry Minister Robert Lightbourne and public servants, foreign investment and industrialisation followed a linear path. However, despite the ‘trickle down’ myth, which is not based on any solid economic theory or research, very little of the growth filtered downward.

True, Jamaica was not unique in this. However, Singapore looked at some of what we were doing, but recognised very early that it should take an approach of improving education at all levels, showing zero tolerance to corruption, and build a society on equality and equity, as a platform upon which real development should take place.

We dropped at least two balls. First of all, trickle down never takes place, unless there are deliberate strategies involving empowerment of the poor, expansion of the middle class and overall redistribution of some of the benefits of the sacrifices workers make. By the end of the 1960s, despite impressive economic growth, the social marginalisation and the widening of the gap between upper and lower classes remained like curry stain.

Fact! Researchers from the University of Sussex, Institute of Development Studies and among them, Dudley Seers lamented that development was “much else besides economic growth”. In Jamaica, growth and poverty increased side by side with the latter as unwelcome as a blood relative, who you would prefer not to visit when the middle-class colleagues come for dinner.

It was increased social marginalisation and economic deprivation of the working poor, which swung them from the JLP’s Alexander Bustamante who had endeared himself to the working class as a labour leader. Too many promises were unfulfilled by 1971.

NO APPROVAL

The 1970s started nicely. However, unlike the present prime minister who refuses to stridently oppose the American president, Michael Manley sought no approval for his relationship with Fidel Castro, then President of Cuba.

It certainly did not help that Manley declared democratic socialism as the official doctrine of the government. Our current prime minister was only a toddler then. However, the senior citizens in his party can tell him firsthand how the petulance of the Jamaican leader created unmitigated Americans hostilities, to the detriment of the Jamaican people. It is perhaps unfair, therefore, to judge the 1970s purely on the basis of the internal policies of Manley’s PNP, because there was no way in which a little Cuba would be allowed to succeed economically as America demonstrated its manifest destiny as Manley fought.

With the deliverance of 1980 led by Edward Seaga, and extremely friendly relations with the American Ronald Reagan administration; one would have reasonably expected a miracle. After major concessions by the hitherto antagonistic International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank as well as Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative, one hardly would have expected that we would have failed an IMF test less than three years into the administration. After seven years of anaemic economic growth, Hurricane Gilbert came and destroyed the little benefits of economic growth from that decade. Ironically, since the only way to go after Gilbert was up; we saw the decade highest rate of economic growth the following year.

A reduction in bloody political tribalism is perhaps a salient achievement of the 1990s. Growth was difficult to obtain and debt to GDP ratio skyrocketed. The pie on the face of the PNP administration of the 1990s was that lack of scrutiny led to the major fallout of the financial sector and the FINSAC recovery, as it is with the failure to regulate SSL, and thus the loss of not only Usain Bolt’s US$12 million, but the money of many other poor people, government have to take the hit.

Whether it is ‘run with it’ of the PNP or ‘skulking’ the IMF test by the JLP, each party has had to fix the travesties of the other.

Doubtless the endorsement by then IMF chief Christine Lagarde of the leadership of then finance minister Peter Phillips, is the PNP’s trophy. And of course, the poaching of former finance minister Nigel Clarke by the IMF might give the JLP bragging rights. Nonetheless, we should recognise that some creatures are ‘chimeras’, with multiple sources of DNA.

If DNA is drawn from the mouth or the anus, the sample indicates a different biological parent.

Dr Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.