Martin Henry OUR POLITICAL system has been described by our present Prime Minister as hostile tribes fighting over scarce benefits.
The General-Secretary of the tribe in power, while serving as Minister of Information, said politics was about who gets what, when, and where. Both are perfectly correct and must be given high marks for honesty. Built into the heart of so-called democratic politics, with Government as provider, is a nasty competition for scarce benefits. We are just nastier than most.
Politics is allocative by its very nature. Every action of Government will differentially allocate resources. One road can't be in two places. And we have seen how by-pass roads, those asphaltic symbols of the 'success' of governments, have made growth and development by-pass towns and communities. The Prime Minister wildly tells a laughing public that Highway 2000 will create 50,000 jobs, sometime, somewhere. He made no mention of how many jobs will be uncreated.
On a recent trip, I deliberately drove off the Old Harbour by-pass and through the by-passed town to see how Old Harbour was faring. It is easy to drive through town now. 'Old Harbour, no problem' for a motorist. I had a word with a roadside callaloo man from whom I bought some beautiful greens. How was business after the highway? "Bwoy, we a struggle fi survive. God bless the one and two car man whey come this way and stop buy something."
It should not have escaped our notice that supporters of the resigned former Minister of Water and Housing, Dr Karl Blythe, have not so much defended the Minister in terms of character (Blythe was left to do that for himself) or of fairness or of capability. The defence essentially is Blythe is a good man him give we house and water. This is largely the public measure of politics.
Distributive decisions in Jamaican politics have been overwhelmingly determined by the bloody struggle of the JLP and PNP tribes. The JLP seem not to have been able to make stick charges that housing under Operation PRIDE was preferentially given to PNP supporters. But the Opposition party would know all about the distribution of housing along party lines and would naturally expect their opponents to play the same game when in power.
Actually, PRIDE may be one of the cleaner housing operations, in terms of who gets what, in the entire history of governments directly providing housing solutions and housing confusions. In the distribution of scarce benefits to the faithful, few other Ministries and Ministers have been as effectively abused as those of Housing and Construction. The reformed Bruce Golding (a former party Chairman and Construction Minister) and D.K. Duncan (a former party General-Secretary and Minister of Mobilisation) can tell us all about it.
A committee report brought down Minister Blythe. The Report of the National Committee on Political Tribalism didn't bring down anybody. But that damning Report said, "The most vulgar and dysfunctional manifestation of political tribalism [the thing which led Mr. Patterson as Prime Minister to set up the committee] has been the development of the 'garrison' within constituencies. These have evolved from the same process of partisan scarce benefit distribution [which the Prime Minister says is the defining characteristic of our politics]". The Committee noted that, "at every forum and in the many submissions the discriminatory allocation of what has been euphemistically called 'scarce benefits' has been urged as the fundamental cause of political tribalism".
The practice of the party in power allocating houses to supporters in order to establish a homogenous voting community was identified as a main cause of the emergence of garrison communities.
Besides housing, land settlement schemes and the award of contracts were identified as among the 'primary causes' of political tribalism in the setting of patronage, "the disbursement of the discretionary favours of Government."
Five years after the Kerr Report on Political Tribalism was handed to the Prime Minister, The Angus Report said, "The Minister [of Housing, Karl Blythe] and/or [his technical advisor and assistant] Mr. Evan Robinson select(s) the site, identifies consultants(usually Mr. Robinson) and contractor(usually the Minister" "Direction comes from the Ministry as to who should get paid, how much and when." And this with the full complicity of Cabinet which gave the Minister 100 per cent support while the Prime Minister urged him to speed up the delivery of land and houses in election year.
The distribution of land and houses may very well be 'non-partisan' but the same cannot be said of the contracts. There can be no doubt, however, that the process is strategically intended to buy political favours for an impending election and the providers need not be too careful about procedure unless, of course an Angus Report is going to bluntly expose bad practices.
A little analysis will show that PRIDE benefits largely the category of voters who returned the PNP to power for a third term by only 27 per cent of age-eligible voters and who must be relied upon for the fourth term. The party, locked in the politics of patronage and scarce benefits, therefore faces a major dilemma from the exposé of the Angus Report and Minister Blythe's consequent resignation: The people want housing, however delivered, and they who have received love the housing man. But the people are now up in arms over 'corruption' such as was exposed by the report, and the party is down in the polls vis a vis the other tribe. The weeks ahead are going to be politically most interesting.
An interesting twist to housing patronage is that some 'deserving' beneficiaries who are party faithfuls may have to hold strain, receiving a kind of anti-benefit in the interest of the party. The squatter settlement of Mona Commons was promised relocation with housing upgrades, but with the legal wranglings over the availability of university lands within the constituency, they and their secure block votes, the story goes, will not be exported to any settlement outside the constituency. But in a real sense, all the 'beneficiaries' of patronage housing, certainly in the housing garrisons, have found that they are losers in the social decay, the tyrannical rule of dons, the economic stigma from the associated crime, the victimisation by the other tribe when in power - truly a Faustian bargain. The gardens have become jungles; and an entire nation goes to waste in the fight over scarce benefits.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
