Editorial | Take the spoils from MPs

Last week’s mini controversy over whether the recipient of a social housing home was the nephew of an eastern St Thomas parish councillor was another example of how people’s miseries often become props in the advancement of Jamaica’s politics of patronage.

The incident highlighted, too, the distortions in the functioning of the public bureaucracy and why better training and increased salaries for government employees won’t necessarily lead to more efficient delivery of services by the public sector. That has to be accompanied by a transformation in how political representatives perceive their jobs and relationships with constituents.

Established in 2018, the social housing programme’s primary role is to provide free homes to the island’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens, including those who reside in areas in imminent danger of catastrophes. It also upgrades multi-family tenement yards, which are common in most of Jamaica’s inner-city communities.

However, each year, the scheme can deliver only five homes in each of the island’s 63 parliamentary constituencies, or 315 homes in total. Additionally, a single “big yard’ redevelopment per constituency is projected per year – 63 in all.

Put another way, the programme’s offering is a scarce commodity managed by the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation (MEGJC), of which Prime Minister Holness is the substantive minister. Generally, it isn’t the beneficiaries who apply directly for assistance. Neither is the outcome of surveys focused on areas of greatest need, nor based on transparent and readily accessible criteria. Mostly, the process starts with a politician, as was the case of the house received last week by the east St Thomas resident, Keith James, 70, who was recommended by local government councillor Michael McLeod.

Mr McLeod said he received information about Mr James’ circumstances then made an appeal for help to the constituency’s member of parliament, Michelle Charles. Dr Charles then made a recommendation to MEGJC. He had no familial relationship with James, Mr McLeod insisted, although a cousin provided the land on which the house was built.

Like the opposition parliamentary caretaker for eastern St Thomas, Rose-Marie Shaw, this newspaper believes that the choice of recipients should be in the hands of the state’s welfare apparatus. Political considerations have no part in the process, which Prime Minister Holness insists is the case.

SPECIAL SPECIES

We don’t question the prime minister’s sincerity in ensuring that these benefits go to the deserving and his administration has achieved that aim. But politicians are, in this environment, a special species with instincts honed to extract partisan value from state resources under their command.

So, even as she called for the housing initiative to be insulated from political corruption by vesting it in a transparent government agency, Ms Shaw, paradoxically, doesn’t want the hands of politicians completely pried away. “I’m not saying that you must take away the power from the member of parliament,” she said.

Notably, too, Mr Holness, as was the case in St Thomas last week, is regularly involved in choreographed ceremonies to hand over homes to the beneficiaries. People don’t just go to an office somewhere to collect their keys. It is clear who is the patron of the benefit. Not the taxpayers of Jamaica.

The approach, of course, fits the pattern of the wrong-headed Constituency Development Fund (CDF), the J$1.26 billion patronage scheme that allocates J$20 million apiece to MPs for spending on projects in their constituencies. Which they deliver with chest-thumping bravado as if the funds are from their personal accounts rather than the pockets of taxpayers. It is not surprising that the CDF enjoys genuine bipartisan support, for whose expansion parliamentarians consistently hanker – as many have been doing in the ongoing state of the constituency debate.

MISSED THE NEXUS

While these are not the only contributors to the red tape, corruption and gridlock that exemplifies Jamaica’s public bureaucracy, Prime Minister Holness seemingly missed the nexus between how the approach to schemes like the CDF and other social welfare programmes and the mistrust and suspicion people have of the public sector. The latter he attributes, in part, to fear by public servants of making mistakes, lest they break rules and be accused of corruption.

This approach, he said, “dulls the organisation, kills initiative and slows down your rate of output”.

“What I am saying is no way to suggest that rules should be removed or loosened,” Mr Holness added in an address to interns of the Office of the Prime Minister. “What I am saying is that we need a new breed of technocrats – a civil servant, a public servant who is consummate in complying with the rules and delivering.”

The model of the public servant that Mr Holness and Jamaica aspire is achievable by transforming the civil service into an elite, and largely incorruptible, institution of talented, highly trained and well-paid staff. But any such system is unsustainable if other segments of the public bureaucracy are corrupt and the permanent civil service is in competition with legislators and the political executive who encroach on their jobs in furtherance of patronage.

Aggressively attacking these issues is Mr Holness’ gift. He can start by redefining the role of the MP, from being distributors of spoils and removing the allocation of welfare-type resources, which parliamentarians now assume to be part of their mandate, to where it properly belongs – in efficient, transparent and accountable institutions of the state.