Ronald Thwaites | Losing trust

Look, all of us are guilty of gaps, large and small, between our words and deeds. Virtuous life can be said to be a struggle to match aim and achievement. An electorate in a democracy is usually tolerant of these failings by their leaders, but there comes a point where trust is lost.

That’s what caught up with Boris Johnson recently and the same moral sensitivity ( however ethically grounded) applies to the revulsion of Donald Trump’s post-election antics and pre-election groping.

Last week, our government courted the same disrespect – once again. Let’s face it. Jamaica at 60 is dirty and nasty. No amount of green costumes or float parades can mitigate that. It is so because we disrespect each other and allow leaders to lie to themselves and to us.

How else do you explain the weigh station at Harbour View which is never allowed to work, the huge fuel loss at JUTC, the millions of gallons unaccounted for at Petrojam, the sale of drivers licences, the rake of the school pickney food and much more? And now this one.

Up to now I have understood the plight of the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA) because I bought the line that they were really never allotted sufficient money to do their near-to-impossible job which they should never have been asked to do. And also because people like Joan Gordon Webley, Audley Gordon and Dennis Chung were approachable and helpful managers. I wanted to believe even as the garbage continued to stink and demoralise.

It’s really bad. In my community private contractors have to be hired to clear the containerised garbage from properly constructed roadside skips. So the Agency gets the money from our stupidly calculated property taxes, but we get to keep the garbage!

TRUST SHOT

No matter how many saccharine interviews the managers give, that tolerance and trust have been shot by the recent auditor general’s report on the NSWMA.

For if they have been paying out billions to truckers without any effective checking of their volume collected and performance, then there is no surprise that the agency’s money is short. It will always be short because their cronies are teefing it under their nose. Every time the expensive scale at Riverton is fixed, someone cuts the wire and management can do nothing about it.

Are we really supposed to be mollified by hearing that the police were called in months ago to investigate the cheque mix-up or that Nigel never gave a multi-billion operation the relative small change to hire enough auditors? Or that the new trucks were a trade-off for COVID expenditure? Really?

It is not good when our leaders stretch our credulity and invite us to distrust them.

The value of the reported corruption is enough to have bought many of the trucks you say you lack. Then, making it worse and compromising them the more, the authority is heard to say that the auditor general has told them nothing they did not already know.

So if you knew about the scam, what have you done about it? And how will the millions swindled be recovered? And how will Andrew, who tells us to “hol on”, hold up his head and engender trust in the face of this, another in the litany of public scandals.

So we scurry to sweep up the garbage for the Emancipendence, fully well knowing that it will pile up again afterwards.

Can you hear the riposte already: “same thing happen in PNP time, so shet yu mout”. Or “ It’s not the government’s fault. It’s the people who are nasty”! No matter how we try to shift the blame, big money spend, the garbage problem remains unsolved. The capacity to feel ashamed is an essential quality of leadership. Years ago, when NSWMA’s accounts were in chronic arrears (now corrected) I proposed that they get no more money till they complied. Uproar in Parliament! “yu no waan di garbage tek up”? Well, the funds continued to flow and the garbage continued to pile up. Go figure.

On July 17, 2018, I moved the following motion in the House of Representatives: “Given the challenges that the National Solid Waste Management Authority has to keep Jamaica clean: Be it Resolved that responsibility for public cleansing be reverted to the Municipal Corporations”.

Of course the resolution was never allowed to be debated. Why? I think we now know. I still want to believe Dennis and Audley that they have things under control. But please, don’t divert us with placebos about the benefits of privatising the land fills. God may come first, and in any event, who says that will make things better?

The pitiful fines for littering, any junior lawyer can draft the required amendments, hand it to your minister and get them passed. Poor excuses for waste and non-performance.

I am still trying to figure out the indispensable function of parish councillors. I remember Mr Seaga’s fit of desperation about the inefficiency and dishonesty of parish councils which led to the creation of NSWMA. But surely it is time to review that decision. What we have is not working. NSWMA should be a regulatory not an executing agency.

The councillors are the public officials nearest the base of society. It should be their responsibility to see that each division is kept sanitary and that the roads, street lights and fire hydrants are in working order. If they can’t be trusted yet to do that, what’s their use? As of now, when I complain to my councillor about the garbage, the best she can do is to make the same phone call to NSWMA that any citizen could do. I am sorry for them. They end up with responsibility, but no power.

BRUCE’S HONESTY

How refreshing to hear Bruce Golding’s endorsement of radical education transformation as he delivered the recent G Arthur Brown lecture. He was bold enough to posit a revised covenant with teachers and a modus for all-society cooperation which will require increased contributions and prioritizing of family expenditure.

The minister and Opposition spokesperson have been invited by the churches and trusts to discuss how to finance quality education on August 9. I hope they will come. That would be just a start for the kind of jointure which Bruce (and the spirit of the late G Arthur Brown which he invoked) advocates. More on that next time.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.