Golding Florida Town Hall Meeting Review

As a young Jamaican who is intent on helping Jamaica and my fellow Jamaicans, Bruce Golding’s visit to South Florida and the town hall meeting at Nova Southeastern University was very welcome.

The Jamaican Diaspora is keen on getting answers from the leaders of the country and playing their part in development, not just sending remittances. This was the first time I had ever attended a speech by Golding and especially looked for the question and answer session that was slated to take place.

The Prime Minister certainly was charismatic and received numerous rounds of applause when talking about combating crime, rooting out corruption and explaining his vision for a better Jamaica. He provided some statistics that I found quite shocking:

• Personal income tax in Jamaica is collected from approximately 245,000 people on PAYE, with the rest coming from only about 4000 people
• 70% of all corporate income tax is paid by only 2% of registered companies
• Jamaica barely collects enough taxes to service debt obligations and money has to be borrowed for everything else (fill potholes, pay police, etc.)
• Upwards of 30,000 students “graduate” each year from high school with 3 subject passes or less

Clearly Jamaica has a problem with tax evasion and the quality of the education system – no news to anyone who pays attention to the news – but the tax numbers were more surprising than I expected. Golding spoke about the need for increasing tax compliance but provided no concrete details, granted, I was not expecting details.

The question and answer session was both refreshing and disappointing because while it presented a platform for an investment banker from Saudi Aramco and the CEO of a Telecom company to talk about investing in Jamaica and needing to make contact with the government, no one took the opportunity to ask questions that I felt needed to be answered:

• The poor handling of Air Jamaica - it has come across as being wound down, not being primed for an acquisition
• Addressing the QUALITY of the education and health systems before making them free – I do not believe that free access to poor systems can be a good thing
• Where is the money coming from to pay for this new “freeness”?

I hope that each of these will be answered in the future and while I believe that Golding has already made some mistakes, I do believe that we share a vision and I should give him a chance. Before Friday night, I had always wondered if I should trust Golding but the town hall meeting, his speech and his handling of the questions managed to change that – I trust him more than most politicians. I only hope that he will work hard to keep that trust.