If Robert Bryan accepts the job as chairman of the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NswMA) it will be good for the agency in several respects.

The NswMA needs a good person at the helm and Mr. Bryan, with his performance as head of Jamaica's Local Organising Committee for Cricket World Cup (CWC), has demonstrated that he knows how to get things done. Importantly, Mr. Bryan appears not to be afraid of speaking his mind and may be willing to stop ministers in their tracks when interference crosses the line from broad policy to operational matters.

Which brings us to another reason why Mr. Bryan's appointment would be an inspired move by the authorities. He may help to save the Local Government Minister, Dean Peart, from himself. Given his recent indiscretions, Mr. Peart clearly needs the help. Then there is the operational mess that has accumulated at the NswMA, which needs to be cleaned up.

The NswMA was in need of a chairman, it is to be recalled, because of the resignation of the recent incumbent, Mrs. Ethlyn Norton-Coke, who gave up after her authority was effectively undermined by Mr. Peart, over an approach for the disengagement of the NswMA's CEO, Errol Greene.

Minister and chairman were agreed that Mr. Greene - accused of overstepping his authority, if not recklessness, in spending the authority's money - had to go. But Mrs. Norton-Coke, uncertain that the case had been proved, changed her mind that he should be fired with the statutory one month's notice. She felt that Mr. Greene should be paid for the remainder of his contract and sent back to the post from which he was seconded. Mr. Peart followed his own will.

As is to be expected, morale is not high at the NswMA, and not only over the recent quarrels. Indeed, Mr. Greene and Mrs. Norton-Coke went to the agency because of scandal that caused the Auditor-General and the Contractor General to cite the former board and management, headed by the then executive chairman, Alston Stewart, of serial abuse of government procurement rules and guidelines, involving hundreds of millions of dollars.

Therefore, when Mr. Bryan begins picking up the pieces at the NswMA, as we expect he will, he can't lose focus of the bigger job; that of cleaning the country, which has not been done properly for a very long time. It is a matter about which this newspaper has often complained.

The greater part of the problem, we insist, is the failure of management and an assumption, driven in part by a politics of 'pork', that achieving even the simplest of tasks demands lots of money. It is to be laid out in troughs.

The truth, though, is that much of public cleansing is about low-wage labour and an insistence that those contracted to provide services deliver fairly on their obligations. In other words, public cleansing must not be a route for the delivery of scarce benefits and spoils while persisting in what former PrimeMinister Patterson called "the uglification of Jamaica".

Mr. Bryan has a hard job ahead of him, but he is on a roll. He has recent performance which he can leverage. And he may just find convergence and conversion. With the momentum of CWC, the Government may have been converted to the relevance of cleanliness.