Transcription
Jamaica just told the IMF to back off. And it's the most revolutionary thing the government has done in decades.
For 46 years, the IMF had Jamaica on a leash. Every budget, every policy, every decision about how this island spent its own money, approved by Washington first. That ended in 2026. Finance Minister Fayval Williams announced Jamaica has fully exited its IMF structural adjustment program. No more conditions, no more oversight, no more permission slips from a foreign institution to run a sovereign nation.
Here is what that leash actually cost Jamaica. The IMF demanded austerity, so Jamaica cut education budgets, cut health care, suppressed public sector wages for decades, privatized national assets built by Jamaican hands. Between 1977 and 2019, Jamaica entered IMF programs seven times, seven times. Each program promised growth. Each program delivered debt. Each program transferred more Jamaican sovereignty to Washington economists who had never set foot on the island.
At its peak, Jamaica was spending 50 cents of every government dollar just on debt interest payments, not schools, not hospitals, not infrastructure, interest. The same colonial extraction model that Britain used with sugar, the IMF perfected with spreadsheets. And now Jamaica is walking away. This is what economic sovereignty looks like. It is not perfect. The debt remains. The damage is generational. But for the first time in nearly half a century, Jamaica is making its own decisions.
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