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PM Bruce Golding: The pot calling the Caribbean kettles black

Oct 08, 2008 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
Jamaica’s Prime Minister Bruce Golding, in a recent luncheon meeting with the Jamaican American Association in New York, rebuked his CARICOM counterparts, saying that he is: “…fed up with the practice by some unnamed CARICOM leaders of begging for assistance at every turn…To go around hat in hand to every capital of the world like panhandlers on the street, telling people how we are the wretched of the earth, we are poor and that we need all sorts of charity; I’m tired of that.”
Clearly, Golding is referring to his CARICOM colleagues and not to one CARICOM leader.
And then, in a recent column, Mr. Freddie Kissoon concluded that Jamaica’s Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s reference to CARICOM leaders as ‘panhandlers’ is unmistakably alluding to President Bharrat Jagdeo, notwithstanding the Prime Minister’s use of the ‘plural’.
Mr. Kissoon ought not to make this allusion, as he did not provide any evidence to suggest or imply that the Prime Minister intended his assertion to mean only ‘President Jagdeo’, by virtue of what empirical verification may expose about any logic he may want to employ.
In fact, Mr. Kissoon’s use of ‘logical deduction’ may be necessary but not sufficient to issue a definitive conclusion that Prime Minister Golding referred only to President Jagdeo in his rebuke of CARICOM leaders.  Mr. Kissoon’s application of ‘logical deduction’ to definitively conclude that Golding referred only to Jagdeo as the only  mendicant among CARICOM leaders is not sufficient, as we also have to see what the observations on the CARICOM region tell us about the extent of ‘borrowing’ among other CARICOM leaders in the region.
And any valid observation will show that Guyana is not the only country doing all this ‘borrowing’. Indeed, this ‘borrowing’ is not for borrowing’s sake; this borrowing is not automatic, too, as the issue of good economic governance comes into play.
And the Golding statement is like the pot calling the kettles (more than one Caribbean leader) black with respect to all the CARICOM leaders. Only last week, Prime Minister Golding begged (using Golding’s vernacular) for US$600 million from the IDB in Washington, DC. Finance Minister Audley Shaw recently indicated that Jamaica will increase multilateral borrowing from the IDB, CDB, and the World Bank.
The Caribbean Policy Research Institute in March 2008 noted that: “Jamaica is the fourth most indebted country in the world (measured either relative to GDP or population), behind Lebanon, Japan, and the Seychelles, with a debt to GDP ratio at the end of 2007 of 132 per cent. This enormous debt burdens the economy with debt service that is the equivalent of 15 per cent of GDP, siphons off the largest portion of tax revenue, and severely constrains the country’s development options.”
And Golding identifies some of his colleagues as ‘panhandlers’!!
Now I am not aspiring to cast aspersions on any CARICOM nation or leader. But as an integrative body, we have to recognise that the Caribbean region is not part of the developed world. Most of these countries carry onerous external debts.
And Guyana is no exception; its external debt was US$2.1 billion in 1992, and today, that debt is about US$700 million.
Thanks to good macroeconomic fundamentals coupled with appropriate macro-management of the economy.
Prem Misir

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