Joe Issa Cool on Metaphor Depicting Jamaica’s Growth Path

Of the many metaphors used to laude Jamaica’s current economic recovery, from a light at the end of the tunnel to an engine at full throttle, business leader Joe Issa says he likes best the “sailing boat” allegory used by Gregory Fisher, managing director of Jefferies LLC, a United States-based investment and securities firm, to depict the island’s recent achievements and good prospects going forward.

In hailing the positive results being recorded under Jamaica’s economic reform programme, at the just-concluded 12^th Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE) Regional Investments and Capital Markets Conference at the Jamaica Pegasus, Fisher likened Jamaica to a sailing boat at full sail with the wind at its back.

Issa, who said he absent at the high-level annual conference but is a big supporter, says in an interview, “I read Mr. Fisher’s comment and was quite amused…I thought it was a cleaver and apt metaphor for where we are at now and where we are going – on a boat at full sail aided by a positive head wind.”

Only recently, Issa congratulated several ministers of government on the successes they are having in reducing its major ills like crime and violence and unemployment, improving the business climate and justice and supporting the stock market, in order to achieve higher economic growth.

Reminded of Jamaica’s rough economic times which has stymied growth, compared with today, Issa says he sees the current positive developments and the prospects for the future in Rod Stewart’s mega hit song “I am sailing across the sea”, stating, however, that “it’s not in stormy waters anymore, as the song suggests, but instead, in calm waters.”

He also finds appropriate, R Kelly’s international single “The storm is over now”, in which Kelly is in a tunnel, can’t see the light and feels a strong wind, but then came a voice saying the storm is over now and he feels sunshine and heaven over him. 

The sentiments were shared by Fisher who, noting that Jamaica had made good progress last year under the IMF programme, citing record 64-year low inflation and 14.3% dividends to bond holders, said “we now have a country that has finally grown past the ills of austerity and is now in (transition to) full recovery,” according to the Jamaica Observer.

He informed that rating agencies had responded by upgrading Jamaica, at a rate higher than Barbados for the first time in history and that “Little Britain” is among other languishing Caribbean countries like The Bahamas; Bermuda; Trinidad and Tobago, which was downgraded; and the Dominican Republic, whose rating went up but the economy significantly underperformed in the markets.

According to Fisher, last year’s successes in Jamaica, in stark contrast to its neighbours, came on the back of an overall bullish capital markets whose performance has generated positive feedback from rating agency, Standard & Poor’s Financial Services LLC.

The agency has indicated it may raise the country’s rating over the next year, provided it “achieves sustained improvement in its external liquidity and indebtedness, along with a growing track record of sustainable public finances,” he was quoted as saying.

In encouraging Prime Minister Andrew Holness to stay the course “so that your beloved country can finally reach its full potential under your esteemed leadership,” Fisher told him that “the wind is at your back and your sails are full”, stating that the successor agreement, which was approved by the IMF Board last November, was a “job well done,” the newspaper reported.

He welcomed the positive feedback from Fisher in his keynote address at the conference themed: ‘Global Investment Horizon: Our Options and Our Future’, stating that it is imperative for Jamaica to get its economic affairs “in order” and assured, “that’s what we have been doing, as a Government.”

Ceteris Paribus or Not: Joe Issa Says As Jamaicans We Are Not a Bad People Urging “Big Up Uno Self!”

In a New Year’s interview about his reflections of 2016, the crime issue and how it portrays and impacts the country, popular Ocho Rios business leader Joe Issa, has said that despite the mayhem being caused by an insignificant yet impactful minority, Jamaica is not a bad country, even when all things are not equal.

“Jamaica is revered throughout the world – our people, culture, music and now sporting prowess; yet, so many of us think we are of the worst kind; well, I don’t think so. Big up Jamaica!

“Others can see it, yet so many of us don’t,” Issa says, referencing the experience of a Canadian policeman, from a force which the JCF has hosted here and was tipped to offer assistance, noting that “he would be acquainted with our crime issue, especially since it’s not his first visit to the island along with his wife.”

Citing a February 7, 2007 Letter of the Day in The Gleaner titled, “An open letter to Montego Bay: Jamaica - a paradise found”, Issa pokes: “Wait till you get to that part when he said, ‘He asked nothing for this, and we were treated to a tremendous day trip. Wayne should be commended for his pride in Jamaica and its people’, to which Issa responds, “That’s the typical Jamaican, taking tourists out and giving them a nice time just for pleasure and not gain.”

Considered in local newspapers as a tourism guru having developed the reputation as a turnaround manager in his family’s SuperClubs chain of all-inclusive resorts which he run and won several local and international awards in the process, analysts say Issa is best poised to know how visitors characterize their vacation experience in Jamaica.

“In my time the vast majority of visitors say they enjoyed their stay here and love the people, cuisine, service, entertainment and the beach, among others, highlighting special experience of acts of Jamaican kindness which, I know is within us to exercise,” says Issa who, through Cool Charities, a subsidiary of his Cool Group is giving back to communities in the form of education of disadvantaged children.

Noting that the decades-old letter to the Gleaner editor could have been written today, Issa cites a part which brings out the true Jamaican even when things are far from equal. In that part the visitor was describing the good times he was having on the Hip Strip where he was staying on his second visit.

 “I met a young man named David, who had one leg. We talked like old friends one morning, early, when I went for my walk. Again, he asked for nothing, only my company. I learned about his country and he about mine. Trust me, I am not naive. I know the difference between whether I am being hustled or not.”

Issa hastens further to get to the end of the letter, stating “it’s the best part…it puts everything into perspective.”

“Much is sometimes made of Jamaica’s struggles with violence. Some people here in Canada even asked us why we would take the risk of vacationing in Jamaica. Certainly January was a difficult month for violence.

“My wife and I have travelled extensively in the world. The answer is this: some of the finest people I have ever met, anywhere, were in Jamaica. The kindness, the genuine nature of their personalities, the strong spiritual strength that was exuded by everything that they did, made them such a pleasure to be associated with.

“Reading the Gleaner every day, with the letters and editorials, it was obvious that Jamaica abounds with persons of this sort – fine, upstanding people who only want the best for their country and countrymen and women.

 “The struggles are there, to be sure. Nuisance drug dealers abound, which takes away from the beauty of the city. Violence, however, encapsulated within small areas, cannot be tolerated. Poverty rears its head often.

“Yet, the beauty of Jamaica and especially its people overwhelms all of that. I speak as a police officer of 21 years service here in Canada, who has seen much. My wife is a nurse with similar years of service. We could likely be accused at times of being jaded by what we have seen; yet we see the beauty in our own city and nation, every day.

“Jamaica is a paradise – and not a paradise lost, but found. We will be back soon,” says Curtis Kemp from Regina, Canada, Via Go-Jamaica