Involuntary Crimes

...It is a disagreeable custom to which one is too easily led by the harshness of the discussions, to assume evil intentions. It is necessary to be gracious as to intentions: one should believe them good, and apparently they are; but we do not have to be gracious at all to inconsistent logic or to absurd reasoning. Bad logicians have committed more involuntary crimes than bad men have done intentionally. Pierre S. duPont.

addressing the French National Assembly in 1790

MICHAEL MANLEY is not a bad man. As prime minister of Jamaica, his hopes, dreams and ambitions merged with the views of his countrymen for eight years as he sought to improve the life of the common people by liberating them from colonial landholding powers, raising their expectations, and freeing them from "Western Imperialism." To some, Manley and his People's National Party (PNP) represented more than a political movement. In the beautiful land of Jamaica, where remnants of African customs, reggae rhythms and popular Christianity comingle to form a unique culture. Manley developed an intense spiritual following. Many predicted that as much as 40 per cent of the Jamaican electorate would vote for Manley in any election, regardless of social and economic conditions.

To Americans, then, it came as something of a surprise when Manley's party went down to an overwhelming defeat at the polls last week, and the prime minister himself was barely able to hold on to his parliamentary seat. Students and professors at Harvard expressed their dismay at Manley's fall. "It's going to set Jamaica back 10 years," Selwyn Cudjoe, assistant professor of Afro-American Studies, said. And Karen Alphonse '83, a Jamaican, concurred. "Manley has raised Jamaica's political consciousness. You cannot get up now and tell Jamaicans they cannot be satisfied," she said.

Superficially, Jamaica's problems are similar to those experienced by all developing nations. Given the history of Latin American governments, Jamaica has an admirably long tradition of democracy, but voters could not help but place the blame for poor socioeconomic conditions on the man in power. They gave Edward Seaga '52--leader of the victorious Jamaican Labor Party--the prime ministry, in much the same way that American voters turned President Carter away Tuesday.

Manley had explained to his fervent followers that Jamaican problems resulted from a devastating triple play: Western imperialism and its effect on the Jamaican capital, a skyrocketing oil import bill and blundering representatives in the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF received particular wrath from Manley, who blamed the Fund for forcing a Jamaican currency devaluation which he claimed had disabled the Jamaican economy. Symbols of last week's election, graffiti scrawled on the walls of Kingston and throughout the country, denounced the IMF for trying to prompt the downfall of the PNP.

Yet in some places, the IMF stands for something other than money. In Jamaican dialect--a strange concoction of English, French and native African languages--IMF last week stood for the question "Is Manley Fault?"

FAULT, OF COURSE, is in the eye of the beholder; but ominous changes in the state of the Jamaican economy since Manley tried to "challenge the power of the Western economic structure" with his form of democratic socialism lend credence to the writing on the walls. The average Jamaican is now 25-per-cent worse off than he was in 1973--and this is an economy which had managed to maintain a high annual growth rate of nearly five per cent throughout the 1960s. Under Manley's system of "land reform," production of agricultural goods declined dramatically, and farm exports plummeted. Tourists, who had flocked to Jamaica's scenic north coast in droves despite widespread instances of political violence--for which Manley's followers must be held partly to blame--left in a stampede after Manley's election, even though, not surprisingly, the violence had subsided. Foreign and domestic capital, which Manley so relentlessly insulted in his harangues against "imperialism" virtually vanished as the all-important "business confidence" rapidly disappeared.

Far more devastating than any of these factors was Manley's treatment of Jamaica's bauxite industry. In 1978, the industry still provided more than 70 per cent of all export earnings; in 1974, Jamaica produced 18 per cent of the world's bauxite; by 1976, its share had slipped to 12 per cent. Part of the blame for the decline falls on strikes and an explosion in an aluminum plant, but the heart of the problem lies in Manley's effort to increase the percentage of government revenue from bauxite exports. In so doing, the prime minister raised the price of Jamaica's bauxite far above world levels, and Australia and Guinea--the two largest producers--were more than happy to replace the slack in supply that Jamaica's artificially high price had caused.

As a result of all these things, Jamaica is essentially bankrupt. Foreign reserves are almost nonexistent. More than 90 per cent of export earnings go to service foreign debt and to pay for oil imports. High unemployment, which was a major factor prompting Manley's election in 1972, has skyrocketed. Youth unemployment, which was about 40 per cent in 1972, now hovers around 70 per cent.

Manley blamed these problems on external factors. Examining his claims superficially, one finds a specious appeal in almost all of his arguments--precisely what would most excite his almost spiritual following. But they do not add up to a convincing case for his PNP. Oil prices have little to do with Jamaica's failures.

In 1973 Jamaica improved its balance of trade--and, given rising sugar and bauxite prices, it probably could have continued to do almost as well had it kept producing about as much as it had previously. And the IMF does not enter a foreign nation unless the nation is having severe difficulties in meeting its balance-of-payments. By the time the IMF came on the scene with promises of loans under stringent conditions Jamaica was already in economic convulsions. To blame the IMF for Jamaica's downfall is to point to a symptom and not the cause. Furthermore, the IMF has demonstrated worldwide that its help has stabilized economies of all sorts. After all, no country can import more than it exports for a sustained period of time.

Manley's greatest hypocrisy is to blame the outflow of capital, a situation which both foreign and domestic sources created. Elected on a platform decrying the evils of foreign capital, Manley was practically inviting foreign capital to leave. And his close relationship with the staunchly anticapitalist Cuba did not encourage foreign investors. Manley has so frightened Jamaican businessmen that they, too, have transferred their holdings abroad. For Manley to blam the outflow of capital which he instigated for his country's economic woes is simply a fraud.

EDWARD SEAGA'S STATEMENTS to date are about as "fascist" (as some have charged) as those of John Anderson. Jamaica must work with Western banks, public and private, to emerge from its economic morass. Conditions have actually worsened in the last few months before the election: Manley depleted almost all of Jamaica's remaining foreign reserves to stock the store shelves and give the temporary, but artificial, impression that the economy had improved. Foreign capital, properly regulated, can provide prosperity and well being for the masses, as has been proved in Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea. Oil imports can be met by expanding the formerly prosperous mining and agricultural sectors, which would simultaneously provide jobs for some of the half-million or so unemployed workers.

Seaga does not have the powerful mystical appeal of Michael Manley, but his performance in government before Manley's tenure did more to help the poor of Jamaica than Manley's violent rhetoric and devastating economic policies did in eight years. Cudjoe claims that Seaga will put Jamaica back 10 years; after nearly a decade of Manley, perhaps this is just what Jamaica needs.