Richard Hall, Contributor

Customers wait for assistance in the downtown Collectorate. Continuing reform of all government agencies is key to national development. - File

As we continue our look at Jamaica's 25-year National Plan, we need to ask ourselves a critical question; i.e. what is required to make Jamaica wealthy and sustain that wealth?

We will need to look closely at government, the civil service, the various reform programmes, and determine what is required to pull these institutions with their excellent initiatives together and integrate them to come up with a winning solution.

In other words, how we will re-engineer government over time to better serve the needs of the people? This may require after the assessment is made, new ministries, fewer ministries, fewer civil servants, or retraining of civil servants to suit new duties/priorities.

We cannot operate in a vacuum. There are two books which I believe put our dilemma into global perspective:

Three Billion New Capitalists by Clyde Prestowitz.

This book talks about 1.4 billion Chinese, one billion Indians, and 0.6 billion Russians, who are set to take over the world. They are all cheap, bright, and focused. Jamaica cannot withstand this new onslaught without a vision and a plan! We need to revisit every aspect of our system of governance and way of life and try to rapidly re-engineer for the future.

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman.

The convergence of events and technology that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations and giving them a huge new stake in the success of globalisation.

Friedman in The World Is Flat further suggests that in order to succeed in a flattened world, developing countries such as ours need to:

Reform wholesale, that is, put in the broad macroeconomic reforms of privatising state agencies, deregulation of financial markets, currency adjustments, subsidy reductions, foreign direct investments, lowering of protectionist tariff barriers, and introduction of more flexible labour laws, and

Reform Retail, that is, looking at four key aspects of your society - infrastructure, regulatory institutions, education, and culture, and upgrading each one to remove as many friction points as possible. The idea of reform retail is to enable the greatest number of your people to have the best legal and financial framework within which to innovate, start companies, and become attractive partners to those who want to collaborate with them from elsewhere in the world.

Government policy review

We will need to research all policies and programmes, that is, see why old plans and policies although seemingly sound did not work; see which plans worked, but were discontinued; see which current policies work/don't work, and why, and whether they would work if something is changed, that is, timing, management, environment, etc.

We will also have to look at new ideas for reforming systems, including examples from success stories worldwide and see why they succeeded, whether they will stop succeeding and why, and whether Jamaica's culture and history militate against similar successes here. As many of us are aware, many social and economic programmes from the '70s were said to be good, yet they failed. We need to understand why.

Civil service reform

If we are to succeed, the state must be employed, not as an economic dynamo, but as the skilled technician that keeps the dynamo running. We must re-engineer the civil service to suit the new plan and needs of the people. This will include retraining, restaffing, making positions redundant, redeploying people, and promoting self-employment. Information technology must be made the driving force for progress and not just a flashy add-on, which is not value adding, that is, have a computerised system with the same number of persons, some of whom are manually operating the same system.

Representation

We must raise the bar and implement checks and balances on what representation should mean, and what national service should entail, with heavy sanctions for those found to have betrayed the national trust. Only the most committed would then continue to pursue public office and there would not be a mad rush to get into politics by those with selfish personal agendas as the system would soon show them up and throw them out.

The role of MPs must for the first time be written in the form of a job description complete with the competencies required, sphere of influence, amount of funds to be managed and the need for proper accounting of those funds, the reporting relationships, and the expected deliverables, that is, frequency and quality of reports to Parliament, and to the constituents (complete with samples), the inputs to the national plan, the frequency and number of constituency management meetings to be held, the dispute resolution process to be used, etc.

Until this job becomes properly structured, it will continue to depend, for its success, on the influence, forcefulness, notoriety, and tenacity of the person in the position, and will more often than not overwhelm that person leading to frustration on the part of all stakeholders. MPs may have to focus entirely on their constituencies and have other professionals handle ministerial duties. The plan will guide the discussions on these issues.