Throne Speeches: sharing burden, sharing success

Robert Buddan, Contributor

The Throne Speech has been delivered to start the new parliamentary year. The Budget Debate will follow this week. The Sectoral Debate will come after that. We should be able to look to the Throne Speeches delivered by our governors general for the direction we have chosen to go forward.

Throne Speeches are rarely analysed. They represent the Speeches of heads of state, but reflect the thinking of the government of the day. They set the tone for government. Most importantly, they usually give us the legislative plan of action of the government for the year ahead.

Over the past four Throne Speeches, the theme of challenges has been constant. No wonder. We in the Caribbean have been facing what Norman Girvan calls "existential threats", and what I simply call crises. These challenges are not understood for what they really are. They arise from the very structures by which we live our social, political and economic lives. But, we have not evolved a model of governance suited for crisis management and existential threats. We continue to plough on with the age-old model we have had since Independence, a model constructed for another time (and place), and, therefore, for a different set of so-called challenges.

Our Throne Speeches have used the softer term 'challenges', rather than the harder term 'crisis'. There really is a crisis in our lives and our ways of living. Throne Speeches have spoken of the challenges of hurricanes and floods, the global economy, and economic vulnerability. In 2008, for example, the speech of GG Sir Kenneth Hall spoke of the "looming recession". But the real crisis is the absence of ways by which we can live together and treat each other with respect, recession or not. If we can't do these things, we will have great inequality, poverty, and disregard for each other. That is not a challenge. It is a crisis.

This is fundamentally why we have handled the recession so badly. We now know that by the last quarter of 2007, the United States economy had entered a recession. But by March/April 2008, the Jamaican administration remained confused over whether we had a recession in Jamaica or not; whether it was good for us or not; whether we should have begun talks with the IMF or not; what policy responses we should have engaged; and whether the recession would have been short-lived or not. It was a costly period of indecisiveness and confusion.

The real problem, however, was structural. There were structural problems that caused the recession and structural solutions for getting out. We need structures of unity and equality for getting out.

Indeed, the 2009 Throne Speech called for "unity of purpose". But there was no unity of purpose in the midst of the Government's confused state of mind. The Throne Speech detailed the impact of the recession. But there was no unity over mobilising people for production, appropriate interest rates for small, medium and large business, negotiating sensitively with public-sector employees over salaries, and deciding how we would share burdens if we went to the IMF.

In those times of great challenge, the Throne Speech of GG Patrick Allen called for the leadership that was required, leadership that would "demonstrate the extraordinary leadership that these extraordinary times demand". Extraordinary leadership should have produced unity of purpose, not division. Those extraordinary times of crisis did not produce crisis leadership. Instead, they produced leadership that was itself in crisis. Neither was Sir Kenneth Hall's hope for a "proactive response to improve efficiency and [to] expand our productive capacity" realised, not then or now.

Navigating our Way

In 2009, the Throne Speech said there would have been two imperatives: navigating our way out of the current crisis, and building a solid foundation for recovery and growth. These imperatives failed badly. This was a very bad period. Negotiations with the IMF began secretly. The governor of the Bank of Jamaica was scandalised by his own Government and fired in the midst of those negotiations. Financial secretaries came and went. Negotiating teams changed frequently. The year ended with a massive tax package in December.

There was no unity of purpose to ensure that the most vulnerable could be protected. The 2009 speech recognised this problem: "The needs of the poor and vulnerable cannot be suppressed. We cannot afford to have the gains in reducing poverty reversed." But the structures of political, economic and social unity do not exist to prevent this. If this was one of the benchmarks for assessing if we had begun to navigate our way out of crisis and lay the foundations for growth and recovery, we had not, not then and not now. Sadly, the official figures show that the poverty rate has doubled in just four years. It has climbed from just under 10 per cent to 20 per cent. This is not just about our failure to grow but about our failure to share the burdens of decline and the rewards of success.

Sharing the Burden

A critical strategy contained in the Throne Speech of 2009 was indeed one of sharing burdens. The sacrifices that must be made, it said, "must be shared equitably". Jamaica has never shared its burdens. It has always been a very unequal society. This is part of, if not fundamental, to the crisis and existential threats we face. We are still not sharing the burden. Poverty has increased, unemployment has increased, and prices have increased. But some people are still living big. Probably some are only living off bigger debt but some have got richer while more have got poorer.

The Throne Speech of 2010 spoke of the need for fundamental change. But this was about fundamental change in expenditure and revenue to justify the Jamaica Debt Exchange. It then spoke of transformation. But this meant rationalising the public sector. We have not heard anything about transforming the private sector. This is the sector that has to absorb the 400,000 young people who are untrained and unattached. We need to treat the small and medium-size business sector as part of the real private sector too. Among these businesses are the working poor and those whose small business is sidewalk vending, with all the vulnerabilities and disadvantages those face.

Government has had to expand social safety-net programmes such as PATH. But this has been for the simple reason that there are more poor people that it now has to support. Poverty would have fallen to explosive levels had Government's programmes not cushioned some of its worse effects, so far. At any rate, two years after the Throne Speech promised burden-sharing, and one year after the Throne Speech of 2010, promising fundamental change and transformation, we are experiencing 14 consecutive quarters of no-growth. The greatest burdens of those 14 quarters have fallen on the poor.

The Throne Speech of 2011 promises that the economy will move from stabilisation to growth. But the IMF reported in October 2010 that "Jamaica is projected to have the seventh slowest growth rate in the world up to 2015, indicating missed opportunities for the debt-ridden country." Can we survive this without structures of unity?

Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. Email columns@gleanerjm.com and robert.buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.