Desmond HenryTREASURE BEACH:
DON'T LET anyone tell you the government's Local Government Reform Programme announced late last year is not a beautiful presentation. Indeed it is outright pretty. Couched in highly emotive language and wrapped between the covers of a 42-page full-colour brochure the document, if nothing else, is very eye-catching. But is it equally mind-engaging? Or put another way, will it do the job? Will it create rural centres of real local development and, in the long run, help rural communities to solve their own problems and master their own fates?
The programme as presented is high on emotion but still somewhat short on practicalities. It speaks a lot about 'governance'. You know, that new-found catch phrase which somehow is expected to transform nonsense to sense, and wrong to right. It says not much, for example, on how you change an embedded local apparatus comprising 13 Parish Councils and the KSAC, from a beleaguered bureaucracy in which less than one per cent of its total staff has any tertiary education, to a modern competitive mechanism designed to attract, win and hold trained, young Jamaicans. It is woefully short on modes of human training and development designed to educate, teach or orientate young rural minds towards a career in government at the local level. The programme, as I understand it, does not contemplate a genuine reward system designed to keeping bright minds.
At another level after years of criticising, almost ridiculing, the concept of County Government, the new programme admits to Regional Government. This means that the existing three geographic counties of Cornwall, Middlesex and Surrey will be absorbed into four regional units with Kingston and St. Catherine forming one grand metropolitan area. The logic of greater efficiency through more co-ordinated centres has finally sunk home. I would have loved to have seen, for example, talk of introducing a curriculum in Local Government management in our high schools and tertiary institutions, leading to post-graduate degree programmes at UWI and UTech
It might be that I read the brochure too quickly, but nowhere in it did I detect an understanding of the concept of international competitiveness through modern marketing and entrepreneurial practices. Come now, how in God's name can parish communities expect to move from where they are now, to where they ought to be in the future without the practice of modern marketing, or the tenets of investments incentives. If the designers of the programme could show me how, I'd be very happy to learn. Where, for example, is the thinking of a rural UDC or JAMPRO to assist this new regime of trained rural managers with the tools to compete for worldwide investments.
As the world moves towards outdoor and environmental tourism, there is not a single thought in the document about this. How important is tourism? It just happens to be Jamaica's largest foreign exchange earner. Are rural communities destined to forever sit back and wait for the crumbs from the metropolis? I don't think so. And how about the concepts of tax and revenue trade-offs, as incentives to attract money and development to rural communities? I saw no mention of these in the programme of governance. The principle of rewarding creative thinking is conspicuously absent. On the question of community education and enlightenment, and hence community enthusiasm, there is very little. Are communities destined to remain as dumb and uninformed as they are now? Truth is, much of this programme is a lot of gloss couched in emotive language.
In the practical world of attracting and winning business, there are some cardinal measurements to which potential investors gaze: (1) low crime rate (2) clean water supply (3) clean air (4) good medical facilities (5) non-burdensome taxes (6) good schools (7) inexpensive living (8) good transit facilities, including highways, railways, airlift and electronic messaging. It would do us well to see how rural Jamaica matches up against these.
The reform programme should concentrate more on rural development and less on rural governance. They are not the same. And when coupled with yet another local government election postponement, it puts sincerity squarely on the line.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
In the long run, democracy means nothing if it does not deliver development.
Desmond Henry is a marketing specialist based at Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth
