PRIME MINISTER Simpson Miller is clearly moved to limit the economic and political fallout from the cement crisis that has been wrought by her commerce minister, Mr. Phillip Paulwell.
On Friday, Mrs. Simpson Miller announced that the duty-free importation of Portland cement, previously announced by Mr. Paulwell, will now be for a year, running, apparently, until June 2007. This action by the Prime Minister directly responded to suggestions by private sector officials that the three-month window for the suspension of the common external tariff (CET) on cement was far too narrow, given the global shortage of the product and therefore the time needed to source it and organise shipments.
From the perspective of Mrs. Simpson Miller, a leader of populist instincts, there are also other imperatives which would have driven her to overrule Mr. Paulwell, the serial blunderer on the cement issue, starting with his recommendation to the government two years ago to give the local producer, Caribbean Cement Company a virtual monopoly on the market by the imposition of a high tariffs on imports.
While the PNP has been in office since 1989, Mrs. Simpson Miller needs her own mandate at the polls if she is to stamp her authority on the party after a rancorous leadership race in March, in which she failed to get 50 per cent of the delegate votes in a four-way race.
Although Mrs. Simpson Miller's personal popularity enhances the PNP's prospects for an electoral victory, this would be weakened, if not undermined, by continued problems around cement and the seeming ineptitude on the part of Mr. Paulwell, and by extension the Government, in coming to grips with the crisis. Indeed, Mrs. Simpson Miller would be well aware that given all that's on the order books, the construction sector should be booming, but that many projects are stalled because of the scarcity of this critical building material. She would also know the drag that is having on the economy, where a 1.4 per cent growth in the first quarter would have been otherwise more robust.
But what is likely to have been of far more concern is the recent statistic by officials in the construction sector that this slowdown in building is costing an estimated 30,000 jobs - mainly low-skilled young men, part of the constituency in which Mrs. Simpson Miller has substantial appeal. Indeed, this is among the group that Mrs. Simpson Miller hopes to put to work in the $1 billion job programme she announced in the recent budget debate - jobs that would be in jeopardy given a shortage of cement.
Now that Mrs. Simpson Miller has moved to fix one of her priorities, she should turn her attention to the ageing teeny-boppers of the Cabinet who may act more out of exuberance than measured thought.
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