Phyllis Thomas, News Editor
MURDER IS the fifth leading cause of death in Jamaica after cancer and lifestyle diseases like heart attack and diabetes, the news said last week. This should force us once again to turn our attention to performance of Ministers and accountability.
The news said that the Government spent $1 billion on injuries last year, 50 per cent of which were as a result of violence. But had the Minister put in charge of the National Security portfolio been performing, and those before him as well, they would long have reduced the level of crime in this country.
How can we get our Ministers to perform, because it's not just the Minister of National Security who is now failing us. In a Gleaner-commissioned poll in February, almost 55 per cent of persons surveyed said the performance of the Government in its first 100 days in office was either poor or very poor. And I am sure that a poll conducted now would have given the same thumbs down for performance. How can we wring efficiency and effectiveness out of Ministers? A number of recommendations have been proffered including development of job descriptions for Cabinet ministers, accompanied by machinery to measure performance and act on non-performance.
ANOTHER OPTION
Here is another option that I strongly suggest we examine. Recall the non-performing Ministers. Currently, it is the prerogative of the Prime Minister to re-shuffle his Cabinet as he sees fit. But this current Prime Minister is loyalty personified and so it is hardly likely that we will ever see him removing a weak Minister from office. Heaven knows that the opportunity has presented itself repeatedly.
I am aware that the Constitution does not now allow us, the people the Ministers are supposed to serve, any say in whether we keep a weak Minister or demand his/her recall. Not even at the level of the parliamentary representative can we make such demands if we are dissatisfied with the kind of representation we are getting. And it would be difficult and probably unfair to root out the non-performing Minister via a political recall since a weak Cabinet Minister could very well be providing excellent representation for his constituents.
But since we are tired of hearing that "we're going to", "we need to", "we have to", and since we hardly ever did those things we need to, that we have to or those we say we are going to, a way must be found to remove the non-performing ones from the system.
Had some of these persons been employed to private sector companies they would have been fired. If we had a system of recall, similar to what happened in California last week, about a half of the present Cabinet would have been recalled for non-performance. Below are just few of the ministers who would have been affected by recall and the situations that they supervise:
Crime - out of control - Minister of National Security. Virtual collapse of the economy - Minister of Finance. The many fiascos of technology (NetServ and all the others) - Minister of Commerce, Science and Technology. Agriculture is dead, the funeral has been conducted and the farmers gone home. Depressed. Hungry. Bankrupt. - Minister of Agriculture. Taxpayers are going to have to pay at least $12 billion to Ezroy Millwood because the Transport Ministry goofed up in the contract it awarded him and later breached - Minister of Transport (Minister then and Minister now). We have failed consistently to educate our people properly and so we proudly wear the garland declaring our illiteracy status in the region. But this Minister of Education is relatively new to the post, just brushing her first anniversary in the job and so we give her some more time.QUALITY OF EDUCATION
The Minister, Maxine Henry-Wilson, fielded questions from members of the public on Go-Jamaica The Gleaner's Web site in January. One question had to do with whether free education would improve the quality of education in Jamaica.
Her reply: "I don't think that free education of itself does or does not lead to quality. It is all the other ingredients of education that will determine this. This includes the nature of the physical building, the plant, and the provision of good laboratories, classrooms, good supports for the children such as libraries, good delivery by the teachers, a relevant curriculum and of course there are some welfare needs such as nutrition, attendance etc..."
We watch to see the fate of education under this Minister.
Where recall is concerned, the apprehension is the cycle of violence that would accompany it, since violence follows our election processes pee, pee, cluck, cluck. Also, given our level of immaturity we could watch for the tit for tat recall.
In January 2000 the National Executive Council of the People's National Party discussed the criteria to determine constituency grades and grades for Members of Parliament and caretakers in the party.
AUDIT
They were expected to finalise the criteria for an audit which was ordered by Prime Minister P.J. Patterson the year before.
If that has been finalised we know not of it. But that would have been a good way for the PNP at least to assess performance.
We want a system that will apply to whichever party forms the Government. Maybe the legal minds can tell us if and how we can best legislate a recall process within our system of government.
I need to place on record, my position regarding the multi-billion dollar award to Ezroy Millwood. It's because of the arrogance of the Government why the country will have to pay more than $12 billion to him. At the same time I think the award is excessive given the fact that the man was driving the bus system to a wreck and would have crashed it anyway. So what in fact happened is that the Government finally rescued us from the excuse for transport system which Millwood and company operated, and which the Government helped to create. Hope they have learnt their lesson about agreements they make on our behalf because these arrangements ought to be in our interest and not merely in the interest of their fren' an' company. Because when it backfires we the suffering taxpayers will feel it.
Comments? You can e-mail me at phyllis.thomas@gleanerjm.com.
