Ronald Thwaites | Thoughts on the Budget

This is Budget week. The big yellow book and the smaller one detailing how the public bodies are going to spend your money are sacred documents.

Sacred! Why so? Because every line of expenditure reflects a principle of governance, evidence of how faithful we are to the covenant between rulers and subjects; an implicit statement of national priorities and a declaration of how we rate humans – fellow citizens, who we are forcing to pay for what a few determine to be for the common good. Lives are destroyed or made to flourish depending on how government spends the tax dollar. And that’s holy business whether you are a theist or humanist.

For 20 years, the budget exercise was an anxious and frustrating time for me as a parliamentarian. What will we say on Judgment Day when called to account as to how responsibly we approved the spending of a trillion dollars of poor people’s money? I trembled.

The Estimates of Expenditure are presented in the most obtuse style possible. The proceedings of the Standing Finance Committee, the only opportunity to scrutinise how billions are to be spent, are squashed into three days at most; questions are discouraged and nothing of substance is ever changed. Civil servants watch and wait with obvious boredom and contempt as the people’s representatives take pride in disrespecting one another. The backbenchers who would want to propose changes dare not open their mouths lest Warmy ‘shot them a box’.

The process is surreal. Everybody knows that the weight of upheld expenditures, unexamined as to efficiency, expensive more than ever now, nyams out most of the money. We argue at the margins. The capital allocation suffers from chronic anorexia and won’t get fully spent anyway, spoiled by the constipation of procurement rules.

It ought to be done very differently. Priorities for spending ought to have been discussed for weeks preceding determination. A zero budgeting exercise in each ministry, department and agency ought to be a routine exercise every five years. A thorough examination of the Estimates, if done properly, should take three weeks, not three days.

The entire effort is anything, but consultative. The Estimates are in large part the creation of the bureaucrats in the finance ministry, rubber-stamped by Cabinet and thrust on to Parliament and the people.

The presumptions undergirding the Westminster model of governance, a workable level of political comity, an ample, even if not adequate economic base, effective civic education, do not describe our reality. We are following inherited forms and ignoring the substance of our needs.

The American lifestyle which we are taught to crave, the castle rather than the cottage; the ‘crissas’ instead of clean, efficient public transportation; beautiful, natural, spiritually adorned dress and behaviour in preference to contrived, garish and self-referential ‘bling’, are ultimately unsustainable. A huge underclass will always be left out. Do we want, thoughtlessly, continue to mimic other people’s styles when that implies leaving so many behind?

Growing social disorder

Worse. All the current road-to-Damascus hand-wringing about the impact of inadequate parenting and weak family structure causing growing social disorder on the streets, schools and communities, is unconvincing in a culture where casual sexual relations and ‘buck-up’ offspring are considered normative in contrast to the difficult joy of committed intimacy and careful child-rearing.

Where will moral and practical principles and their ensuing policies be found in the Budget allocations which will be presented tomorrow? Those are what we must be looking for from the figures and speeches; anything less is just partisan spam.

DESPAIR AND HOPE

Same time as the traffic fines have increased, so have the amounts exacted by some officers of the law to ensure a “bly”. “Whey yu can do fi yuself”? is the rampant query. And when victims are told to report such incidents by those who swish by with sirens, outriders and security cars, anger is inevitable. What do those in charge know of what ‘gwan a road’, about the consequences of making a report against a policeman or soldier?

Or the guy in the agency responsible for your licence or permit who repeatedly asks if you have a spare car he can use or importunes you to send cash to help with his granny’s medical bill. Many in one of the professions I am familiar with get superior performance from certain public offices only by having a “points” inside who “untengles” bureaucracy when encouraged by Hennessey, a resort weekend or a small brown envelope. Short word; the petty corruption is worse than ever. It is “follow fashion” of the rip-offs by the high-ups.

Last week, I encouraged fright instead of nonchalance when a good primary school lost four teachers in a week. This time I have to tell you about the highly regarded high school which has had a turnover of 60 staff members over the last year and some. Replacements have been found, but at a great dilution of quality. What line in the Budget will speak to that?

HOPE REVIVES

Hope revives in the models and lessons learned from three good-good Jamaicans who passed recently. Delano Franklyn enfleshed the bearing and ethics of Gibson and Forrest who had nurtured him at Kingston College. A nationalist to the core, he blended reflection and scholarship with activism, often behind the limelight of the platform, but in the forefront of mature thought; he added wisdom to political discourse.

John Mais was the advocate of responsible and dedicated family life. In his disarming, laconic way, he would engage any and everyone with the message of wholesome family life, not as constraining discipline, but as joyful order and serenity. His genuineness and simplicity drew many of us to his message and lived example.

Then there was Bishop Robert Thompson, someone who could have occupied any high office of commerce or the state, but who chose to serve God’s people as his priest. In the mold of his mentor, the late Bishop Alfred Reid, Robert’s gift was to move with grace and ease across all the ascriptive chasms of race, class, politics and religion which Jamaicans have dug for themselves. His book, Redemption Song, Reading the Scripture for Social Change, is a primer for all who dream of an ideological praxis beyond the polarities of right and left but steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition, seasoned with Creole realities. He was easy to befriend. And what a gift that is!

In the midst of all that is tawdry, hope springs from the prospect of following in their footsteps.

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