The following is an excerpt of a speech by Richard Byles, delivered at the annual awards banquet of the Jamaica Institute of Engineers at The Jamaica Pegasus on November 28.

I'd like to speak to you today as a very concerned Jamaican. I've been around long enough to know that we have great potential to hope that one day we would have fulfilled that potential, but I'm sorry to say that we are here at a crossroad, another crossroad, and we've been here several times before, and the question before us is, "Will we make the right decision or will we find a muddle that gets us through with a temporary solution?"

I want to put into perspective how ill the economy really is and I won't quote too many figures, just three. Generally speaking, in economic terms, an economy that is growing at an average rate of four to six per cent can manage a debt to GDP ratio of somewhere between 40 and 60 per cent. Rating agencies and international lenders consider that to be acceptable. We have a 120 per cent debt to GDP, our growth rate over the last 20 years has been one per cent and I was startled the other day when I heard the president of the PSOJ quote some productivity numbers that over the last 35 years our real productivity has fallen from 345,000 GDP per worker to 220,000. We're not going in the right direction, we're going in the wrong direction.Let me tell you a story about three countries, one of them is Jamaica. In 1962, the year of our independence, we had GDP per capita of US$463. In 2006 it was a little shy of US$9,000. There is another country much smaller than us, whose population is less than Portmore and which, when you are approaching it by airplane and you are about 5,000 feet off the ground, you can see the entire island; their GDP in 1962 was US$417. Now if you were a betting person, you would say that Jamaica would have whipped this country. In 2006 their GDP is US$18,000, so they have more than doubled our pace of growth and development, notwithstanding their size. That country is Barbados.

Singapore's story

There is a third country which, in 1962, had a GDP of US$429 and today that country's GDP is US$51,000 and it ranks fourth in the world in terms of GDP per capita, and that country had nothing but a port and a mosquito-infested hinterland. That country is Singapore.

Why do I tell you these stories? To me it graphically demonstrates, as if they were businesses, the path that these three countries have taken. What is it that Barbados has over us? Barbados had a plan and that plan simply was 'let us build the brand called Barbados'. That's all they have. They don't have bauxite. They have built the brand called Barbados and that brand stands for civility, calmness, an educated population and today they have more than twice our GDP per capita.

A country like Singapore had nothing but a port and they invested in education, having one of the most highly educated populations and in technology, but they had a plan and they worked that plan. In fact, if you liken these three countries to three businesses, just think of a community with three corner shops. You left them there as corner shops in 1962 and when you returned in 2006 one of them had become a supermarket, one Walmart and the third was still a corner shop - I'm afraid to say that is our country.

We have a near-term problem and that is the problem of our fiscal deficit and we're going to have to fix that, and it's going to take everyone's commitment to fix it. We're all in this together, unless we are going to pack up and leave, and many of us can't do that because we have family and business roots and we can't leave so we're stuck here and we have to work with it and all of us will have to make a contribution to it, and at Sagicor we stand prepared to do whatever is reasonable and whatever is good for the country.

But the big question is not so much the near-term problem but the longer-term solution that we need to be really good at. The IMF is going to help us with the near-term problem, not just with finance but with telling us what we have to do. We have to help ourselves with the longer-term problem of where are we going as a country and how do we want to get there, what does it take to get there?

Four must-dos

Having not been a practising economist, I can only tell you what I would do in business and what I have done in business. I think there are four must-dos.

The first is: leadership must step up and leadership must make the decisions expected of leaders. Leaders are not followers. Leaders must do what is right, even when that is not the popular thing, and if I can put my finger on one thing that we have not done very well in Jamaica over 30 years is to take that unpopular decision, bite the bullet and do the right thing, and we have to lay that responsibility squarely at the feet of our leaders, that's what leadership means. But leaders are not everything, leaders need a team.

Given the problem we have, we need an All Jamaica team and it can't be an All Manning team or All daCosta Cup team for those of you who know schoolboy football. It has to be an All Jamaica team because we need the best minds, the most committed people to attend to this problem, regardless of whichever way they vote on election day, it doesn't matter, we need the skill and the talent.

Let me tell you, I never appreciated as much what the American system is, and I have to congratulate Prime Minister Golding, in his former life as head of NDM, when he spoke about constitutional reform. We need it because constitutional reform, in some form or fashion, is required to put managers where we are managing things and put politicians in Parliament where they make policies and pass laws - not in charge of ministries that make administrative decisions.

Second, we need a plan. We're going nowhere without a plan and there is no business that can be run without a plan. In my opinion, we have not had an economic plan in this country since the 1950s and '60s. Remember what those plans were? It was 'import substitution' and, for better or worse, that was our plan. We knew it and we worked it and it brought growth to the country, at least for a decade, if not more. Maybe when that plan became outdated we never had the savvy to know and to change it.

Impressed with progress

Do you know that in the early 1960s Lee Kuan Yew came to Jamaica and was very impressed with our progress and we were using the import-substitution model at the time. He went back to Singapore and I believe he tried it but, of course, he went for the export-oriented model. So maybe we held on to our model a little too long but the point is that we had a model and since the 1950s and 1960s we haven't had an economic model. In the '70s, I would describe that one as a model of social equality - that's what that time, the '70s, was about. The '80s was a period of stabilisation and the '90s was a period of liberalisation, but nowhere in any of those decades is a plan.

There is no plan in globalisation. What have we pursued as a plan in the last 15 years with liberalisation? We have flung every window open, flung every door open, all the breeze and wind and hurricanes have passed through and we're hoping something will stick but it has not stuck that much.

We need a plan and we need to work that plan. I don't know exactly what that plan is but I think there are some ingredients that we know must be in that plan, somewhere, and one ingredient has to be education. How can we go anywhere in the 21st century without education? We have to find the resources, somehow. We have to be creative and we have to find a way to begin the process of educating our young people.

Security problem

Third, we have to solve the security problem. Now I don't understand something. Colombia had perhaps the worst security problem. When you talked about organised crime, Colombia was the mother but today they can proudly say they have whipped it. I don't know how they did it but someone needs to know, some member of the team under that leader needs to know and needs to be able to do it because our problem is just a fraction of that of Colombia.

Just as it is in business, when you have a challenge, you have to rise to it. Your competitor is doing something, go and find out what it is and do it better. We have to solve the security problem because it can't be insurmountable.

Finally, in the plan somewhere must be energy. There must be a solution to our high energy cost because I don't know where we are going without education, without security and without cheaper energy that can drive industry for us.

The final plank, I think, in this list of must-dos, leadership, team and plan has to be to communicate. It sounds simple but I know in business how important it is. You have to communicate and communicate again and again. That's how people understand what it is you really want to achieve. Speaking one time is one thing, doing it, speaking again, doing it, speaking again is what eventually makes people take you seriously, and I think that in Jamaica we need to do a lot more of that communication so that everyone gets on board with where we are going and how we're going to get there.