Valerie Dixon, author of ‘Too Black to Succeed: The FINSAC Experience’ (a seminal book which uses the experience of her family-business to evaluate the misadventure that was the Jamaica Financial Sector Adjustment Company (FINSAC) in the 1990s. In the book, Dixon who is currently the Lady President of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the association founded by Jamaica’s first national hero, the Right Excellent Marcus Mosiah Garvey and which is now 105 years old, in this interview with SEYI JOHN SALAU, noted that leaders in Africa and the Global Diaspora forgot how to be black and ‘African’ and strove instead to be Afro-Europeans or neo-colonials and so betrayed many promises made to their indigenous citizens. She thus urges the younger generation to draw inspiration from the life of the iconic liberation fighters to chart a fresh course for their country. Excerpts:
You are a student of Marcus Garvey and his philosophy that the black man has the inherent capacity to excel. Looking at the Jamaican leadership, do you think they have impressed in terms of harnessing the potentials in the country?
I do not think the Jamaican leadership has impressed in terms of harnessing the potentials in the country. Jamaica has a vast reservoir of talented people and persons with great potential, but much of this potential has remained untapped, primarily because our leaders tend to support foreigners and foreign goods and services while ignoring what is available locally. They look externally to supply most of the wants and needs of the country while ignoring the home-grown entities. Our leaders ignored the major points in Marcus Garvey’s manifesto that emphasise the importance of protecting the local labour force, the local industries and the encouragement of local entrepreneurship.
In your book ‘Too Black to Succeed’, you pointedly blamed the wholesale adoption of economic recipes of WTO and other multilateral agencies for the loss of balance in Jamaica’s economy. What should be the mindset of developing countries in their relationship with such agencies?
Developing countries would be well served to follow the black-print of national hero, Right Excellent Marcus Garvey. The Jamaican Economy lost balance when it chose to favour foreign trade at the expense of its local producers and local industries. As a result, it depressed local initiative and innovation making Jamaica a consumer economy rather than a producing, self-sufficient nation. The mind-set should be to protect home first in order to build and protect the sustainability of the economy.
At independence, a lot of African countries had a lot of promise, at what point did they veer off?
At the point of Independence many African countries held great promise for their nations. However, there was not enough collaboration among themselves and many expected support and cooperation from their former colonial masters. There are those who genuinely wanted change to reflect their independence, while others simply wanted to replace the colonial masters.
In other words, there was not sufficient unity or internal support within and among countries. While the colonials were in place, they had established a certain amount of stability and identity, even if these were coerced and forced boundaries used to artificially divide or fence-in the indigenous Africans. It was these divisions that helped to veer these countries off-course, as they did not see themselves as one united people. ‘Up ye mighty race you can accomplish what you will’ did not resonate. Many who tried to instill that ideal got a great deal of ‘push back’, often to the point of losing their lives.
After the lions and martyrs left the scene, what surged to the forefront of leadership was just a cohort of black-white men who had graduated with high degrees from the white colonial universities and who, to my mind, were indelibly stained with the education and culture of their mainly European oppressors. For the most part, the leaders in Africa forgot how to be black and African and strove to be Afro-Europeans or neo-colonials and so betrayed many promises made to their indigenous citizens.
Given the emerging new economic order characterised by economic nationalism in Donald Trump’s America and China’s pseudo-dominance, what should be the safe path for Jamaica and the Caribbean?
There is no safe path for leaders who are not tied to any ideology or philosophy and whose public utterances about the acquisition of foreign homes and other foreign assets, do not demonstrate that they are loyal to their homelands and fellow citizens. Any path that will lead to instant-gratification in the acquisition of material wealth, seems to be the path chosen by many leaders in Jamaica. For these reasons, they experience no dissonance when they sell their country’s natural resources and communal lands to foreigners and leave their citizens with less resources and less assets with which to develop any form of national pride.
They fail to realise that if the USA, under Donald Trump, is striving for economic nationalism and isolation, and China is vying for economic and cultural dominance imposed on the world, especially in Africa and the Diaspora, that they as black leaders should also strive for a path that should lead to self-sufficiency and sustainability in Jamaica and the Caribbean, instead of pursuing a path that leads mainly to economic and cultural dependency.
What are the options for Jamaica’s government to rev up entrepreneurship within its local business community?
If ‘Too black to succeed: The FINSAC Experience’ achieves nothing else, it has successfully revealed how the economic disaster of FINSAC decimated the economy of Jamaica, devastated the dream of having more successful businesses owned by more black Jamaicans who make up 90percent of the population. Today, the once enthusiastic entrepreneurs who became financially ruined, have lost collateral that would have allowed many to access funds and once more, revitalise entrepreneurship within the local business community.
One option that needs urgent attention is for the government to stop selling and divesting the nation’s natural resources, such as the Cockpit Country, the Taino settlements, natural habitats, and the beaches to foreign interests. Another is to give local investors and entrepreneurs similar incentives to those given to foreigners coming to compete with them for a share of the economy. Unfortunately, it appears that the current government has chosen the option to appeal to foreigners and the progeny of the white and brown cash-rich planter-class to once again control the heights of the Jamaican economy, ignoring the indigenous investors who were instrumental in building Jamaica as a nation for the past 50 years, and who were, for the most part, the investors destroyed by the FINSAC tsunami.
Your book had much on the past that should inspire the younger Jamaican population. What is it about the past they should draw inspiration from?
I think that the young people should draw strength and inspiration from the wisdom, perseverance, and fortitude of their ancestors. Their ancestors, like the mythical Sisyphus, worked so arduously, without reaping the proportionate payday. Similarly, their elders, despite their creativity, innovativeness and ingenuity continue to be victims of a similar fate.
Young black people of today can draw on these strengths combined with current knowledge and education to address these injustices and inequalities. To be forewarned, is to be forearmed, and experience teaches wisdom. ‘Too black to succeed: The FINSAC Experience’ gives them some of the information with which to arm themselves to ensure that no one will be able to ‘pull the rug from under their feet’ and cause their dreams and aspirations to collapse, as they strive for upward economic and social mobility.
What are the inherent defects in FINSAC and how could it have been made to have a more positive impact on local entrepreneurship?
The late owner of the Eagle Merchant Bank and Group of Companies, Paul Chen-Young said it quite clearly in Appendix E: ‘…What FINSAC failed to do was to carry out its mandate. I can think of no financial institution where it worked with the owners or management of the collapsed businesses to return them to viability. FINSAC failed to deliver according to its mandate and therefore, abrogated its responsibility to the country.’
The government-owned FINSAC had the mandate to return the threatened enterprises to a position of viability. However, what FINSAC did was to repay the cash-rich lenders their full, bloated, interest when it became due and totally ignored the plight of the beleaguered producers and manufacturers. Once again, those who did no work received all the compensation and those who did all the work received nothing.
All the FINSAC had to do to have a more positive impact on the local entrepreneurs, was to carry out its mandate and help these companies keep afloat, by reversing the exponentially high interest rates which led to their collapse
What’s the lesson for Africa and the rest of the Caribbean from the Jamaican experience in adopting the WTO policy liberalisation?
According to Claude Clarke in Appendix F of the book, ‘Many other countries have, to this day, resisted the implementation of WTO measures that they consider potentially harmful to their economies. The then Jamaica Government’s reaction was to behave like helpless lambs. The contradictory government actions put the Jamaican productive sector in a competitive straightjacket.’ Without divulging too much, this Appendix is a ‘must read’ for Africa, the rest of the Caribbean and the Global Diaspora leaders who wish to learn from what happened to Jamaica after it adopted the WTO’s liberalisation policies.
Jamaica’s productive and manufacturing sectors were overwhelmed by the advantages given to imported competition. A more fulsome account of the then Government’s unwise liberalised trade policies can be read in Appendix F and this account, along with the other Appendices should serve as a lesson for Africa and the rest of the Caribbean.
Marcus Garvey’s Manifesto for his Peoples Political Party (PPP) included protection for the local labour force and protection for local industries, especially fledgling industries. Instead, the government of the day, decided to unleash the Liberalisation Policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on to the Jamaican economy without maintaining a competitive currency and without protecting the interests of the productive sector, especially the local exporters. That was a sure recipe for disaster.
