Editorial | Mr Golding’s destination

Having made progress at his party’s conference a week ago, Mark Golding should not now lose it all in salivating over the possible implosion of the Holness administration.

For even if that were to happen because of the corruption-related investigations of Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ finances, it wouldn’t be sufficient for Mr Golding and his People’s National Party (PNP) to waltz to power. Or they would enjoy only a short honeymoon unless the new administration demonstrates that it has, and can deliver on a big vision for Jamaica. Which is more than making broad policy declarations.

Mr Golding, as part of his effort to show that the PNP should be taken seriously as a government in waiting, accomplished much on the policy front at his party’s 86th annual conference, the opportunistic and stupid Vybz Kartel distraction notwithstanding. But he still has much more to do, including sharpening his vision for the country, spelling out what are his priorities, stating the timeframe within which they will be delivered and articulating the nexus between the policies and his vision for Jamaica. In other words, Mr Golding has to be clear on where he wants to take Jamaica, why citizens should follow him, and how he expects to get them to that destination.

In his speech to the conference he offered a long list of initiatives which a government he leads would pursue. These include a community-based approach to Jamaica’s crime problem; fundamentally altering education outcomes; ending the government’s siphoning of money from the National Housing Trust (NHT), allowing to finance more homes; and lifting the economy out of low-wage, low-technology, low-growth trap.

BIGGER IDEA

But policies should anchored in a bigger, and hopefully transformational, idea. That is the bit about Mr Golding’s destination.

In that sense economic growth, better education and security arrangements, as vitally important as these are, should be pathways towards the larger end. National development is more than an accounting exercise.

Having engaged Jamaicans on his planned destination, Mr Golding has another critically important task.

Given the country’s limited resources and the imperative of maintaining fiscal and macroeconomic stability, he must enunciate the policies that will be given absolute priority (we advise a major focus on education and security), demonstrate that the intended projects have been costed and can be funded, and declare the timeframes for completing the various phases of the undertakings.

In that regard, the PNP policy commissions – assuming that it has those or similar bodies – should, over the next three months, in conjunction with the party’s shadow ministers, unveil the details of the programmes, the party intends to pursue in government.

This should not be some abstract undertaking or the formulaic satisfaction of a perceived obligation. Rather, it should be seen, and in fact pursued as an element of partnership with the citizens who the PNP wants to vote for the party, and Mr Golding wants to lead to that place where he believes Jamaica should be. The policies should be open to public critique and the party and its shadow minister receptive to feedback.

Take the matter of education, for instance. It is quite striking that more than two years after the publication of the Orlando Patterson Commission report on the transformation of Jamaica’s education sector, the PNP has neither initiated nor been involved in any significant public debate of the commission’s observations on the state of education in the island or its recommendations for fixing its problems.

Of course, facilitating at least one member of every household in Jamaica to get a university education is a good thing, which would find few opponents. Yet, the deep crisis in Jamaica’s education system is not primarily about access. Indeed, access has expanded significantly over the past 60 years.

FUNDAMENTAL ISSUE

The more fundamental issue is the quality of the education offered to, and received by, large swathes of students. Recent studies suggest that Jamaican students, on average, lag many of their global counterparts by two years with respect to the amount of learning they achieve during their period in school.

So, a third, and up to 40 per cent of students complete their primary education functionally illiterate; a higher ratio doesn’t meet the standards for age/grade level competence in mathematics.

These problems are taken into, and continue at, high school where a fifth of students fail at English in the Caribbean Examination Council’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams. The failure rate in maths was over six in 10. Further, only 14 per cent of students pass five subjects, including English and maths, at a single sitting.

In this scenario, it is unsurprising that only 27 per cent of the relevant age cohort is enrolled in some form of tertiary studies or that nearly 70 per cent of the workforce has no specific training for the jobs they perform.

Such failings are a substantial drag on economic and social development and must be part of the big conversation that Mr Golding and his party must begin to have with Jamaica in talking about his destination for the country.