Dawn RitchTHE WALLS are tumbling down about our ears, but Prime Minister P.J. Patterson has given the responsibility of securing a social contract to his new Minister of Development, the somewhat antiquated Dr. Paul Robertson. And this while Dr. Davies, the Finance Minister, publicly boasts to the party faithful that he made unsound financial decisions for PNP political purposes, which increased the public debt last year on a grand scale. Matters were not helped either when the PM backed him fully in this insanity, and that neither can see anything wrong with this.
Quite apart from the creation of this new ministry, which looks awfully like a "make-work thank you" programme to me, the idea of achieving a social contract in this brutal environment of social and economic injustice is sheer fantasy, due largely to the actions of the Government itself. The Jamaican Confederation of Trade Unions (JCTU) recently boycotted meetings with the Ministry of Labour and Social Security. The officers in that ministry, the JCTU says, are not inclined to discussion and providing guidance in the industrial disputes placed before them, but seem now automatically to send everything to the Industrial Disputes Tribunal, or the courts. The Ministry of Labour stands accused of making no effort at conciliation.
The JCTU suggested that the sudden departure in October 2002 of the ministry's most expert adviser, Anthony Irons, a former Permanent Secretary, has left a void in the ministry's industrial relations department. Horace Dalley, Labour Minister, said however, that "The loss of Tony Irons is a blow, but life has to go on. It is the same department I inherited three months ago, except for him, and people have to rise to the challenge."
If the loss of Mr. Irons was such a blow, why then did one of Mr. Dalley's immediate predecessors, Danny Buchanan, remove Mr. Irons as Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Labour and make him an adviser and consultant? Sources in the People's National Party tell me that Dr. Omar Davies is in the race for the presidency of the PNP, a race not declared, and not expected for some years yet, despite the Prime Minister's pre-election promise.
The Ministry of Labour is meantime, however, pitching labour disputes out the door, and becoming unavailable for advice in these matters. This repressiveness hardly helps the social contract that Finance Minister Omar Davies so urgently needs to be able to get any kind of national budget going at all. It appears that the successors to Portia Simpson Miller at the Ministry of Labour have not grasped the meaning of the role of that ministry. Not surprisingly Mrs. Simpson Miller has since recruited Mr. Irons as special advisor to her in her latest sojourn as the Minister of Local Government and Community Development, having had a brief tour in Tourism.
As Rodney King once asked "Can't we all just get along".
Three weeks ago the Patriots, a group of young professionals affiliated to the People's National party, called for a re-examination of the PNP's low-inflation model, citing mixed results. The Patriots is the PNP grouping which supports Dr. Peter Phillips in the PNP leadership race. Their public criticism of the low-inflation model gives credence to that sympathy, because it was a shot across the political bow of Dr. Omar Davies, and he fell for it. He found it necessary subsequently to boast at a PNP constituency conference of his impeccable credentials as a comrade, for making unsound financial decisions in the interest of securing a fourth term which they now enjoy. Can't we all just get along indeed.
Vendors have been removed from the streets in downtown Kingston without a riot. At the time of writing the streets have been clear for over a month. No other Minister of Local Government and Community Development has done this. They've talked about it, but they didn't do it. Mrs. Simpson Miller didn't say a word, and did it. For the first time the Town Clerk has a leader, it appears, even in the country's deepening financial crisis.
Nevertheless immediately after her appointment, the Prime Minister promptly gave responsibility for urban renewal to at least three other of her Cabinet colleagues. So it ought to be obvious that in the leadership sweepstakes Mrs. Simpson Miller is way behind the starting gate.
Fairness alone requires that the only front-runner, Dr. Peter Phillips, be given a handicap since Mrs. Simpson Miller is being kept out of the race. Instead he is being allowed to goad Dr. Davies into disqualifying himself from consideration. I realise that people are making their moves all over the place, but for a fair race all the horses should at least be saddled and properly shod. In Dr. Davies' case however, it is hard to conceive of a horseshoe big enough for that hoof, or a bridle big enough for that mouth.
The poor PNP and JLP councillors islandwide are going to make themselves hoarse calling for jobs, roads, water, and health clinics for their divisions. Yet the supreme irony is that a Minister of Development has just been created to work at meetings in the hope of arriving at a social contract. This was the same effort that had to be abandoned in the mid 90s, but which is now being sought amid severe economic difficulties, of unions boycotting the Ministry of Labour, teachers boycotting the classroom, medical technologists boycotting the labs, and long before the Minister of Finance started boasting publicly that he sent up the public debt by making unsound financial decisions for partisan political purposes.
To add insult to injury every Member of Parliament, except JLP Delroy Chuck, is prepared to justify their salary increases, hold on tightly to these ill-gotten gains, and live in happy expectation of much more.
In the midst of this spiralling madness, the Government has announced that they intend to close down the Bellevue Asylum, the one place left in Jamaica for us to hide from them. The country is no longer to have an asylum. Indeed all the vast parcels of land owned by the Government and vested in the Urban Development Corporation (UDC) are to be developed, and what can be returned to arable agricultural land made so.
I can't bear to think of what might happen next. At a specially-convened and recent meeting the PM mandated the UDC to "Make Development Happen". This might signal a return to agricultural collectivism, a policy created and abandoned as unworkable by a previous PNP Government in the 1970s. But not before the heart had been torn from Jamaican agriculture, however, because the PNP is ideologically opposed to large tracts of land devoted to profitable commercial agriculture in private hands. One thing I do know. Undoubtedly the chairman of the UDC, the ubiquitous Dr. Vin Lawrence will have to speak to Finance Minister Dr. Davies about it, and also to Dr. Robertson, Minister of Development. Three Ph.Ds meeting as Government officials on a public matter are like three coins in a tin cup, hardly a sign of economic development.
Furthermore it becomes much noisier once they're joined by that other Ph.D, Dr. Phillips, Minister of National Security. He is presiding over unprecedented numbers of murders, abductions and suicides islandwide. There will then be four copper coins in a tin cup, if also the tiniest, making the most frightful racket that public administration in this country has ever endured. Worst of all, the man gleefully rattling the tin cup is, of course, none other than a constitutional lawyer, the Prime Minister himself. It is a most undignified and shameful spectacle indeed. No contract, much less something as serious as the sacrifices involved in a social one, is possible with a premier who expresses full confidence in the admitted financial irresponsibilities of his Minister of Finance. Mr. Patterson stands unclothed, without a shred of credibility, nor hope of regaining moral authority.
