Ja must invest in its people
Published:Friday | March 7, 2014 | 12:00 AM
THE EDITOR, Sir:
In response to The Gleaner's editorial of March 6, 2014 titled 'Beware of the xenophobes', I am a black nationalist, but I am not a xenophobe. In fact, I have close friends of multiracial descent. I shared the same pride of every ecstatic black, Chinese, Indian, Syrian Jamaican at Tessanne Chin's win of 'The Voice'.
However, I have a problem with the lack of transparency with which Government approaches investment deals. I want to know what is in it for every Chinese, Syrian, black, white Jamaican in Jamaica. What kinds of jobs will our people be getting as opposed to the Chinese? And what's in it for them? How will we benefit from the construction of the logistics hub? And to what extent? When investment is made here, what percentage do we get of the returns?
I have no problem with, and do not deny the contributions the Chinese have made to culture and development, and I do not defend the progress of only black Jamaicans. I am a nationalist in a holistic sense and beg the posed questions with every ethnicity in mind.
The Government seems to be very generous to foreigners and quite nonchalant to indigenous investments. Why haven't our cottage industries in the 1970s been expanded and supported? Why have we stopped making our own shoes, clothes, sweets, coconut oil?
Sugar as an example
Why did it take a foreigner to improve the sugar industry? Was it so hard to figure out that the same ol' machine gonna produce the same quality and quantity of sugar, that we need investment in the ideas of our own people and expansion of our own resources for us to stay alive?
Why is it so difficult for us to understand the simple equation of development? If we must borrow, why not spend it on building local state-of-the-art factories that use our local resources to produce commodities of international standard?
Why can't we have a 20-year plan that monitors children of every conceivable aptitude, train them accordingly, and guarantee a job for them when the time comes? China has a plan, do we?
Every great nation has a sense of nationalism. China is so great because it looks out for its own. Let us get the point. If we do not invest quality in our OWN people, we will have nothing to hand down to Jamaica's next generation - black, white, Indian or Chinese.
Incompetence and corruption in high places hamper us. It is sad that too many of our people are too gullible to see it.
T. RUTHER
St Elizabeth