Ronald Thwaites | Permanence or performance?

In a nearly 60 year working life I have never had a ‘permanent’ job – like the ones in the public service when you are appointed to a post. Most of us work on agreed terms for specified periods and the continuation of our employment depends entirely on consensual standards of performance and productivity.

I believe that is how it should be. But that is not how it is for most of those to whom we pay out some 12 per cent of Gross Domestic Product each year. Emerging from the unregulated advantage-taking conditions of the colonial period where workers had no talk, labour agitation and a principled sense of justice has created rules which protect workers from arbitrary dismissal by assuring most of them security of tenure, very often without accountability. If this divorce between remuneration and productive outcomes is allowed to continue, there will be no transformative growth.

When I served in government the annual evaluation of workers in the education sector produced almost universal scores of satisfactory or excellent assessment – despite the scandalously low outcomes confirmed, for example, in the Patterson Report. A skilful player could work the provisions of the still-unreformed education regulations so as to be absent from duty for most of a term on full pay. Once you are “appointed, it is nigh on impossible to be dismissed.

COWARDLY POLITICS

Neither political party dares to undertake the thorough public sector reform commensurate with getting value from current expenditure not to mention providing the best services for a prosperous economy and peaceful society. Efforts to rationalise the operators of the state bureaucracy cost Prime Minister Seaga his job two generations ago.

PM Manley presupposed a strong work ethic and enduring national spirit to balance the improved worker rights labour of his era. Nigel Clarke makes the same presumption that “reward sweetens labour” and is leaving us with a much better rewarded sector but no demonstrable concomitant of better service and higher productivity.

Bigger pay and all the restored allowances alone have not been and cannot be sufficient motive for higher labour productivity. Check the behaviour, diligence and output of the Gordon House people if you want proof. Massive pay increase but same sloth and inadequate output.

There is a spiritual and emotional component which along with sanctions for non-performance is missing nowadays. Nigel is leaving this aspect of his portfolio unachieved. The broader society feels frustrated and powerless. The corrupters are having a field-day. Rightly or not, the growing perception of corruption in government emboldens those who can be tempted to follow this example.

WHO IS HIDING WHAT?

So this is the worst time for the government to be reversing its position on the unexplained wealth of public officials. What signal do we think the public, already cynical, is picking up – especially when the Head of the stream, instead of just telling us how his businesses have managed to do so well, is pleading privacy and inveighing against the very legislative regime which he has been more than part-author and outspoken evangelist? Why not keep faith with the people rather than attack your own fences?

Others will haggle about the politics of all this. My concern is about culturing a national spirit of trust and credibility which must attach to those who, supposedly on our behalf, take and spend more than a trillion of our weakening dollars every year and make laws which affect our rights and responsibilities. Current events are sending bad, bad signals.

Another very dangerous sign last week was the derisory 11 per cent turn-out in the heavily campaigned North East St Ann election. It is getting to the point where existing political factors cannot excite a respectable turn-out even of their own supporters despite an attractive candidate, plenty money, rum and boom. Consider too that from the pictures there were almost as many visiting party leaders and faithful as there were electors who bothered to vote. I consider Mr. Samuda a thoughtful person. What transpired in St Ann last week is nothing to dance and prance about. I wonder if he realises how slender are the cords which sustain our institutions?

MAKING EDUCATION GREAT AGAIN

On that same campaign trail, Mr Holness was reported as as acknowledging the reality that parents, even at primary school, are being asked to contribute to the operation of their child’s school despite his government’s hollow and wrong-footed delusion that what the State sends to each school is sufficient, without more, to pay for good education. He told the St. Ann people that he is going to “do something about it”.

It is ‘trumpish’ to believe that because a particular political tendency wants us to believe their version of things, that reality obligingly adjusts. It cannot be good leadership to be so divorced from the universal experience of Jamaican schools having to be further diminished if parents do not contribute and if fundraising be not an unwanted imperative for Principals and teachers.

No school can run effectively on the money Government provides. Bear in mind too that we political bigwigs insist that our children attend the best schools with the highest auxiliary fees which we pay without a murmur while encouraging others to short-change fi dem pickney.

This is budget time. The best ‘trend’ in education would be to agree a reasonable budget with each school and for the State to make up the money for those parents who genuinely can ‘t contribute. Principals and teachers know who those are. So should councillors and members of parliament.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Why did it take the officials who run down every own-account taxpayer, more than ten years to discover the rot at Stocks & Securities? And how come some people seemed to have had a “pripps” to withdraw their money just in time while others are so likely to lose?

Next, despite the genuine efforts of some police, (never mind the cloying and incredulous self-congratulation of their hierarchy) is it not clear that the flow of firearms and enough ammunition to slaughter most of us, keep flowing in? How come? And which agencies and individuals will be held accountable for no water in hydrants to fight a fire in the middle of Lucea?

When your position is de facto ‘permanent’, when there is no premium on performance or consequence for ineffectiveness, change, let alone transformation, is unlikely.

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 UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com