Jamaica treading through its difficulties

GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Stabroek News - Since Michael Manley succumbed in the second half of the 1970s, after his experiments in economic and foreign policy radicalism, to the IMF’s insistence that he accept one of their more severe programmes for the recuperation of a depressed Jamaican economy, the country has gone through a number of attempts at trying and retrying those IMF policies to which it had originally objected. Governments of both parties, the Peoples National Party(PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party(JLP), have gone through variations of the programmes proposed by the IMF, but have generally encountered popular resistance. Consequently they have either given up on implementation after a while, or they have felt constrained to go to elections, which they lost. The most recent episode of this was the failure of the JLP government of Prime Minister Holness, who succeeded Bruce Golding on his resignation in September 2011, in disgrace over America’s displeasure with his handling of its request for extradition in the so-called Dudus affair; an episode which was followed by Holness’s inability to convince the electorate that he could successfully conclude, and then implement, a new IMF programme.