Editorial | The CDF corrodes much else

No one should heed the call to irresponsibility and bad governance by councillors Fenley Douglas and Norman Scott, and the other members of the St Catherine Municipal Corporation (SCMC), who want to replicate the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) at the local government level. Instead, Messrs Douglas and Scott, as well as the 63 members of the House of Representatives, should join the former parliamentarian, Ronnie Thwaites, on the road to Damascus, without having, like Mr Thwaites, to await “the freedom of hindsight”.

In the circumstances, they should lobby for the scrapping of the CDF, that millstone of partisan patronage that weighs around the necks of MPs, and argue for a return to their intended roles of legislators and advocates, rather than distributors of state resources, handed out as though they were private gifts from personal means. This, of course, would insist on the need for an efficient, honest and public bureaucracy that manages reasonable schemes for social welfare.

Established in 2010 under Bruce Golding’s premiership, the CDF is one of the few initiatives that have enjoyed consistent bipartisan support, notwithstanding the occupation peeve by the opposition party, especially when it has few MPs. The popularity of the scheme rests on its annual allocation of J$20 million to each of the 63 members of parliament to be spent largely at their discretions, with some nominal oversight from a unit of the Office of the Prime Minister, which – the auditor general found out during an audit of the fund last year – does not do a very good job at it. They only do not get more – for which MPs often clamour – because of the fiscal crunch that Jamaica has faced since the introduction of the scheme.

When Mr Golding launched the scheme, his rationale was that while MPs interacted with their constituents and faced their requests for personal assistance and community development, he or she controlled no resources with which to respond. And if indeed the Government had the resources to meet the needs, the public bureaucracy was generally too slow in responding to the request.

So, rather than fix the deficiencies of the State, Mr Golding, unintentionally or otherwise, entrenched an arrangement that allows politicians to make end runs around the public bureaucracy, delivering dollops of pork. That is to the partisan benefit of MPs. Now, municipal councillors, through whom MPs often operate at the divisional level of their constituencies, want to get into the act in their own right.

A FOCUS FOR THE PM

Last week, Mr Douglas, a People’s National Party member of the SCMC – which is controlled by his party, though it is in opposition at the national level – called for specific annual financial allocations to be made to councillors, similar to MPs. He was frustrated, Mr Douglas said, at being unable to assist residents of his division who appealed for help.

“I can’t sit while the people we represent are calling on us at five o’clock in the morning to say that the community is being flooded out and we have to say to them, ‘There is no funding to assist’,” Mr Douglas said at a council meeting. In other words, Mr Douglas wants a greater, and direct, hand at patronage.

Mr Scott, the council’s chairman, agreed. “As a matter of fact, MPs don’t know the drains in the constituencies. All they know is the main drains,” he said.

Mr Scott also argued for the right of councillors to share in another facet of patronage that largely falls to MPs: the distribution of applications for people wanting to go on overseas farm work programmes.

Happily, Ronald Thwaites has come to recognise the CDF for the corrupting and corrosive element that it is, as well as how the Jamaican MPs have evolved to being distributors of welfare benefits and meagre spoils, undermining the ideals of good governance and serious legislating. Indeed, legislative authority and oversight has been ceded almost entirely to the executive, with the remainder of Parliament operating mainly as rubber stamps.

“We really could do much better,” Mr Thwaites wrote in The Gleaner on Monday. “A reasonable social welfare system, a swift and responsive public works system and a revised scheme for funding education and health could replace the pressure on the CDF.”

Mr Thwaites is right that change will demand “a bipartisan recognition of the futility of the present order and a resolve to take legislative matters more seriously”.

However, Ronnie Thwaites’ mea culpa will not get that done. This kind of reform, fundamentally, belongs to the prime minister, the leader of the Government, who exercises enormous constitutional powers. The good thing is that Prime Minister Andrew Holness has talked a good deal about improving Jamaica’s processes of governance. This is one area on which he should focus his attention.