The FINSAC commission is officially dead and buried, never to be resurrected again. A commission which spanned some six years, ate up hundreds of millions of dollars to look into the country’s worst financial crisis is over with the publishing of the documents — redacted and in no linear order — of the commission. Missing from this tranche of documents is the long-awaited and much-hyped report which would have outlined, summarised, and given a history before, during and after the meltdown.
Instead of that, what we have been provided with is a bunch of documents which will take hundreds of man-hours to make sense of and will require a team in order to provide anything resembling the report we were promised.
The release of these documents has pleased no one except the Government. The Opposition, as they seek to look statesman-like about an issue they in large part created, have blasted the Government for not releasing the report — some would say they should be thankful but that is another matter — while people who have suffered from the financial implosion are critical because no report, blame or anything has been provided.
Now, I am not here to go over the history of FINSAC, the country had a bad sickness and the cure which was provided while treating the patient damn near killed them and kept the country in a state of shock for years. The PNP didn’t cause the sickness but they offered the remedy, and that is in part why the report will not be made, at least not by politicians, because it hits close to home and both parties across administrations 83-97 have to take the blame for the sickness.
This was spelt out rather neatly by a victim of FINSAC who, in lamenting the non-publishing of the report, noted that members of the JLP benefited from the meltdown and the actions taken after. This is not a partisan thing, a large swath of the middle class was wiped out; many big companies disappeared overnight and both parties and their beneficiaries benefited handsomely from it and that is why, in large part, no real report will be tabled.
Sure, the Government is happy because it resurrects the ghost of PNP mismanagement, but the people are not foolish. The fact that no report, no summary, or an outline has been provided is enough proof to show that this was not taken seriously because big names, both politically and financially, would have been totally embarrassed and no party wants to alienate their donors.
This would have been good politics a decade ago when I was in my 20s, I remember FINSAC, lived through it and have questions, but my generation is not the target demographic, it is people who are now in their 20s, not their 30s, who are set in their not voting ways. The problem is that generation doesn’t know or care about FINSAC. They do not know or care about the 18-and-a-half years of PNP rule because they came of age during Bruce/Portia and got their first vote with Andrew. The 18-and-a-half years may as well be my parents talking about the 80s — a lifetime ago, and while interesting and impactful is not the item on the agenda now.
An honest assessment will tell you that Jamaica was not the only country to go into financial straits during that period. The west had a crash earlier and Asia just a few years after ours. This was systemic and in large part a hangover from the latter part of the cold war days when the US was pumping money like crazy in an attempt to wean former Soviet allies away from the USSR (like Somalia, for example). When the US ended this following the collapse of the USSR and shortly entered a financial crisis the world followed. As noted, the illness is different from the cure. But in an effort to gain political points, we seek to conflate the two.
Will the full ever be told? Was it simply incompetence? If so, why did international institutions laud us with praise? Was it because there was a true threat to the ethnic minority upper class and that FINSAC was a way to keep the black man off the ladder of ownership? This has been alleged and the people who make the allegation have evidence to back it, they say. Or is it that political elites and their donors saw a crisis and used it to further their own interests?
One thing is for sure, the Government and Opposition do not want us to know this information. The PNP with Mark as justice minister could have published it but chose not to, and the JLP with Audley as finance minister promised but failed to deliver. Now we have this, we can assume this will be the end of it from the side of the State, and what we have is a bunch of papers that the public will have to make sense of if they are to truly get to the bottom of this. This is a burying tactic, hoping that we will be satisfied, take their word for it and just not read through it.
This non-report should act as a warning to everyone. That dying bunch who preaches about truth and reconciliation regarding the 70s, for example, must take note. It will all end in a political whitewash much like Mannat Phelps and Phillips, a nothing burger after millions are spent on attorneys and other experts. If we want the truth, the full unvarnished truth, we the people must pry it from those in power and not be satisfied with the crumbs we are given.
This will not have the achieved effects. The PR gurus of the JLP have fumbled this one as there is no there, just a bag of words which the majority will not go through. With no smoking gun, the PNP can continue to say they are totally clean, that it was just a freak event and the wheel of Jamaican politics will keep turning. Will we get to the bottom of this? Probably not in the way we would like or should, but we will eventually, no thanks to those in positions of power.
Until that day we will have to keep on speculating, guessing and assuming that both sides benefited from this meltdown to become immensely wealthy and live high lives. As those beneficiaries grow old and die and the victims continue to fade into the graveyard, time, it seems, is on the side of the wrongdoers, unfortunately.
There is much to learn from the debacle. How, for example, international institutions can’t be trusted or that the jacking up of interest rates will have negative impacts on borrowers and not lenders (shocker). But with no report, no study, nothing of substance we may very well be doomed to repeat the same mistakes — a financial meltdown followed by a lost decade with blame cast but no real culprit brought to face the books.
