Ronald Thwaites | Listening to ourselves

Last week our elected representatives undertook the annual irresponsible sprint through the Estimates of Expenditure in the Standing Finance Committee of Parliament. In a few hours of largely superficial oversight, they justified spending $1,300 billion of our money between April coming and next March.

The substantial issues raised were really for media consumption because there will be few if any changes in the final tally of expenditure which will be passed into law. The country cries out for transparency and change. This budget will deliver very little of either.

RECKLESS PROCESS

I contend that the budget process is reckless. It is an unwitting scam against the people of Jamaica. Who can vouch that each line of the Estimates advances the common good? Who asks questions as to whether recurrent costs are worth repeating based on efficiency and planned outcomes? Which company, public or private would authorise future expenditure without strict accounting of prior performance? And what about up-to-date audits of ministries, departments and agencies? Not important when you have the power of law to extract from the taxpayers pocket.

Who is looking about these issues for the ordinary Jamaican whose livity is weakened by the quantity of tax payable in exchange for poor service?

ZERO BUDGETING & “ROASTING”

Each political administration, led by the nose by the public bureaucracy, refuses a process of zero budgeting. A parliamentary resolution providing for this was ignored by MPs for 10 years. So the structure of government never gets a shake-up. Items of expenditure recur year after year without interrogation. And then we are told that things are going great. Oh, but there is no money for some of the essential ingredients for fruitful living.

There can be no surprise that most of the public who have difficulty dealing with agencies of the State feel alienated from government and presume (very often correctly) corruption. There are places now where the bill for the “roast” which will allow for your business to go through reasonably quickly, is printed and given to the customer. Refuse to pay and you will wait until Armageddon or be blocked at every turn.

WAGES & PRODUCTIVITY

The Jamaican public sector has no capacity to reform itself. Significant salary increases which have raised the State’s wage bill to nearly 13 per cent of quailing GDP-and have no correlation to measurably improvement in productivity.

Both Andrew Holness and Nigel Clarke were heard last week imploring us to produce more, thus placing the responsibility for prosperity on our shoulders, not on theirs, who were the ones who promised it in the first place and who preside over a budget exercise which, if corrected, could yield so much more.

Public servants are threatening the Minister of Finance to strike if we do not make good on the raft of allowances they are still claiming. With general elections just over the horizon and the politburo obviously rattled by local election underperformance, I predict the government employees will get all they want despite Minister Clarke’s correct warning that pandering to these demands will mean reduction in capital and social expenditure.

BUDGET WEEK

So this week will be full of budget hype and frenzied banging of desks. Expect one bag of promises and possibly a dollop of tax relief to prime voter turn-out beyond its embarrassing low. But have such commitments ever been fulfilled in the time or at the cost touted?

I challenge the government to commit to lay on the table of the House the details of all public contracts over $20 million value. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, after all. Who is the landlord who charges a less-than-effective ministry $4.5 million a month for stush office space? Who prospers from the big money paid to poorly feed prisoners, hospital in-patients and infirmaries?

OTHER MATTERS

At last under the leadership of President Ali of Guyana, CARICOM is bestirring itself to address the tragic deconstruction of Haitian society. At the meeting in Kingston today, Jamaica should be chastened for feigning solicitude with pretty words about concern and a promise to accept some war orphans while practising cruelty by excluding asylum seekers without due process.

Compare our weak concern about Haitian lives and freedoms and our primetime, breaking-news fetish about a British Privy Council decision expected this week. Do we listen to ourselves?

Subsidies

Last week I queried allocation in the upcoming budget of a $200 million grant to the Caribbean Examinations Council. I described the CXC as prosperous and capable of managing on their exam fee income. But Dr Wayne Wesley, CXC’s CEO (and Jamaica’s loss as a former leader of HEART Trust NTA) tells me that CXC is not profitable because regional governments have frozen exam fees below economic cost. This is folly. Subsidise those worthy but financially disadvantaged students by all means, but stop the sleaze of perpetual subsidy. Jamaica is CXC’s biggest customer so has talk.

THE MAN FROM FOUR PATHS

Last Thursday Carlton Davis launched his autobiography. His story deserves much more treatment than can be given in this piece. But undergirding everything else about his career, the crucial role of family values and home training stand out. The narrative of material modesty, neighbourhood solidarity, committed and faithful relationships, made everything else possible. The habit of reading and the zeal for knowledge endowed Dr. Davis and his ilk with the exquisite combination of competence in both humane and scientific studies.

Thankfully, there are more like him who focused and struggled in a pre-independence age which offered little for those who looked like him. Some still do so. The shame of our time is that with so much more opportunity and freedom, so many waste themselves on the altars of frivolity, greed and self-obsession. Recapturing that earlier culture should be the compelling discourse if we were really listening to our better selves.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The WI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.