Outgoing Prime Minister P. J. Patterson has delayed his departure because he feels something they do not. The imminent threat of sudden death. He's had his hand on the tiller for so long that it has become impossible for him to imagine life as a mere passenger.

This is why he is making a public spectacle of himself. He says there are final decisions to be taken, Cabinet projects to be completed, and has presided over what his office billed as 'a final Cabinet retreat'.

Forgotten

But the minute Patterson leaves everybody is going to forget about him. Nobody is even going to bother get out of his way on the sidewalk. Yet he believes that he can legislate from the grave.

The new president and prime minister will want to be master or mistress of his or her own vessel. All the final decisions Patterson says are to be taken, to say nothing of his final Cabinet retreat, are therefore irrelevant.

Any successor will want to appoint his or her own cabinet, and can be counted upon to do so. Additionally, this new person will want to set a national budget, and the minute that happens that's the person in charge of the country. Not all the king's horses nor all the king's men can change that.

No last-minute decision more dramatises Patterson's hysteria than the one to move the Police High Command from Old Hope Road to the old Jamintel building downtown Kingston.

The old site, one of the few remaining green spaces in the city, will be converted into two- and three-bedroom townhouses for young professionals who can't afford the going price. National Housing Trust will look after everything, and also lower the infrastructure cost as well. Such plans are also afoot for areas in Barbican. These plans have properly been met with an outcry from the residents of these communities, none of them having paid for their homes through government subsidies of any kind.

Patterson has never understood commerce. He prefers to live in a ticket of legislation both real and imagined, designed for other people's lives. Had he any sense of profit and loss, he would realise that there is a good reason why some things are too expensive for some people. It is the first and only harmless signal they'll ever get that the object of their desire is beyond their means to maintain it.

The Prime Minister's plans will therefore ensure the degradation of any community into which they are put. Even some people who inherit townhouses have to sell and move to rented or smaller accommodation because they are unable to maintain them. The prolonged economic crisis in the country, and lack of middle-class employment, have already created more than a few of those sad stories.

advice

Young professionals are, therefore, best advised to live with their parents, and save themselves the grief. Do not listen to Patterson's siren song, because it will cost you more than you have.

Bear in mind that the Jamaica Conference Board has reported that people who get remittances are increasingly using them to pay their utility bills. Last year, Jamaica received US$2 billion in remittances, far more than earnings from tourism or bauxite. Too much of it has already left the island to pay Mirant, the new foreign owners of the Jamaica Public Service Company. Jamaica is charged twice as much for electricity as is paid in Trinidad.

It goes without saying therefore, that this deal with Mirant, brokered by the outgoing prime minister, was in a couple of years, later followed by Mirant emerging from bankruptcy in the United States. But it has forced the majority of Jamaicans to have to decide too often between paying the rent, and paying their electricity.

This was an impossible situation to begin with, so it is not surprising that more Jamaicans are sliding into penury. The jobs vanished long before Mirant came in, so It feels like they're picking our bones. Large and foreign, they're the quintessential bottom-feeders. Even the local head said publicly that we were hardly worth his time, and so they got a toe in other islands.

Patterson claims he's relocating the Police High Command in order to set up a 'symbol' to criminals. If that's all he can do before his long-awaited departure, he shows himself a dismal dunce. But it cannot be stupidly, it must be deliberate malice. That relocation will be a bullet right between the eyes of what's left of justice in this country.

Putting the Police High Command there is a meaningless symbol which will frighten away many ordinary people who may have to see the Police Commissioner.

Jamaica will never be able to afford the arms and technology necessary to defend this high-rise building completely surrounded by fractious inner-city communities ­ not now, nor in the foreseeable future. As usual, Mr. Patterson has come up with a costly public symbol, much as he created Emancipation Park, while allowing historic Devon House to fall into ruins and become a place of vagrants, rape and murder.

The Urban Development Corporation owns 100,000 sq. ft. of vacant commercial office space downtown, yet virtually all government ministries and bodies are uptown paying high rents.

The Ministry of National Security and the Attorney General's office alone are paying JA$60 million per annum. Yet the disaster fund for Jamaica has only $20 million in it. It should be obvious to any prime minister where national priorities should lie. But not to the longest-serving prime minister in our history.

Patterson even tolerates the Export-Import Bank, a government body relating to the Bank of Jamaica, saying it is going uptown no matter what. Ex-Im has, they claim, a $100 million to buy a building uptown. Why bother?

Not only is space available downtown, but Ex-Im could build on the parking lot east of the Bank of Jamaica right on the waterfront, and provide some critical mass downtown.

Downtown Kingston was always to be the country's financial centre. But the Patterson administration caused the meltdown of the domestic financial sector, and now downtown Kingston is not good for anybody anymore in the Government services. But it's supposed to be good enough for the Police High Commissioner of the country ­ and not even on the waterfront, but right in the middle of Fletchers Land.

buying the old banking hall

If the Ex-Im Bank is dead set on buying a building, Patterson should tell them to buy the old banking hall built by the Government beside the Jamaica Conference Centre. It was purpose-built for Century Bank's headquarters, but it is empty now, and owned by the Government. It is only a very pleasant walk of one block away from the Bank of Jamaica. Any move uptown is lunacy. But hard-earned taxes wasted on this kind of systemic foolishness, instead of funding river training and drain-cleaning nation wide, is what will lead to the death of us all.