Dawn Ritch, Contributor
UPON THE idea of merging ministries, Government departments and downsizing his Government, the Prime Minister has poured complete and utter scorn.
In his Budget contribution to the House of Representatives, P.J. Patterson said that he had no intention of merging the Ministry of Development with the ministries of Industry and Tourism, Commerce and Technology. The first one dealt with policy, he said, and the other two implementation only.
How do these things manage to be different? And why did he drag that in?
Not a soul criticising the size of the Budget has said that public funding for schools, hospitals and security should be cut. So I don't know why he dragged those in either. He was responding to the fact, however, that the entire country is astounded that public expenditure is to increase by $14 billion, and, along with it, our taxes.
There has been consistent public outrage about Government waste and inefficiency. Outrage about ex-politicians getting big consultancy contracts in the public sector, and the astronomical growth in their number and expense.
Outrage at the lavish and unconscionable expenditure on the mansion of Governor and chairman of the board of directors of the Bank of Jamaica, which made the decision to purchase and refurbish the house. He decided that he didn't want the palatial residence, but failed to alert his board to this fact in four and a half years.
In his Parliamentary response to the latter, all the Finance Minister, Dr. Omar Davies, could find to say was that he'd have the figures independently audited. Was this to be a house, or a commercial enterprise? The class of figures involved, anywhere from $44 million to $56 million, suggests the latter.
Between the next armada of legislation to be launched, the audits to be done, the government committees still to be formed and the reports to be written, it is small wonder that the Government feels entitled to $14 billion more in taxes. They never tire of making work for themselves at huge public expense, while ignoring the elementary tasks of basic good governance.
ATTEMPTS AT CREATING JOBS
For example, those three ministries that the Prime Minister is unapologetically not merging. Dr. Paul Robertson has been given a kind of professorial tenure on ideas by being created Minister of Development; Aloun Assamba is to smile brightly for the cameras as Minister of Industry and Tourism; and Phillip Paulwell is to continue to be youthfully exuberant as Minister of Commerce and Technology. Since JAMPRO falls under all three, who is ultimately responsible for the agency?
This bare-faced attempt at creating jobs for the boys makes a nonsense of public administration. A consequence is that, as Beverley Lopez, president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) recently noted, the public is now totally confused, and doesn't know where to go for what.
There was doubtless a reward to Dr. Robertson, for having secured the fourth term as PNP election campaign co-director. The other PNP campaign director Maxine Henry-Wilson, now has been upgraded from Information, to run the huge Ministry of Education.
The General Election has resulted, however, in the considerable reduction of the PNP seats in the House of Representatives. Government must, therefore, be expanded to supply jobs even for those who didn't win. Why all the extra ambassadors appointed, and why was the losing PNP candidate Anthony Hylton made an ambassador? And what is he, Ambassador for Petrol?
And why isn't Shirley Tyndall, Financial Secretary in the Ministry of Finance, being allowed to do her job? She is the one responsible for preparing a financial budget for her Minister.
How then did Dr. Davies come to the House of Representatives with an incomplete budget and without a list of the new items which will now attract GCT?
This is ludicrous. Dr. Davies never had the list, hadn't seen the list, yet purported to table the revenues that would come from the items on that list. How then can he work out how much revenue he's really going to get?
Even when he closed the debate he still didn't have the list. So, in effect, the country still has no real budget. Dr. Davies must realise this, otherwise in looking for $1 billion more in taxes, having removed the GCT from agriculture and pharmaceuticals, he wouldn't take $2 billion worth or double of new taxes from the gaming industry. This is proof positive that he doesn't trust the figures he's been given, from a list he hasn't seen.
Even the Most Honourable Prime Minister himself was unfamiliar with his text. He was grimacing and growling at it throughout. Were different pieces of it written by different people? It must be said that they managed to produce a work of remarkable irrelevance.
Mr. Patterson announced that he was going to produce 3,000 apartments in one year at a cost of $3 billion. I have, therefore, checked a leading quantity surveyor on this pace of construction, and he says that 3,000 in a year is completely and totally impossible from a standing start.
GRAND GOALS THAT CANNOT BE REALISED
Mobilisation and acquisition of land, finance and infrastructure will take at least a year. The industrialized systems to produce the housing is the easiest part he said, and was done 35 years ago in Jamaica in Tivoli and Rema. So we didn't have to go to Malaysia for the technology of producing economic four-storey apartment blocks for the inner city.
Dr. Davies and the Most Honourable never tire of coming to the House of Representatives to announce grand goals that cannot be realised.
While Mr. Patterson spoke, some members on the Government side of the House stretched and yawned on live T.V. Indeed Minister Aloun Assamba fell fast asleep, and managed to wake up in time for him to turn around and refer to her. Who can blame them? What he was saying was meaningless, and full of red herrings.
Nevertheless the Prime Minister kept insisting at the end that he ". . . was doing something right". According to that point of view, he fell short only therefore by not asking the people of this country to take a vow of poverty.
