Ronald Thwaites | Official exhaustion

The governing regime in Jamaica is exhausted. There is no longer even the pretence that current policies will offer basic opportunity for upward mobility to the majority of our people in our lifetime. Our best efforts are expended to settle for two per cent non-inclusive annual GDP growth.

Massive economic inequality and the breakdown of family formation continue to erode the foundations of society. People see what is happening and the haemorrhage of talent migration or just turning off and inwards, are the most common responses . No use even getting vex, just do yu t’ing.

Government is turning in on itself too. If you want to keep Ms Llewellyn and burnish the prestige of her office, what could explain the completely unnecessary clumsiness of the effort? Tone-deafness is too mild a descriptive epithet. Their repeated arrogance is closer to the pathology of self-cutting.

You non-government members of the Constitutional Reform Committee, please ask yourself what purpose do you serve other than face-cards? Because if even while you are volunteering your sweat to renew the fundamental law, the government is minded to get up any morning, “intoxicated with the exuberance of their own verbosity”, and change the constitution without any reference to you, don’t you catch the rake?

The public mistrust of your Committee and its modus operandi, already in negative territory, is eroded further if you, who are supposed to be the last redoubt against the self-professed autocrats in leadership , just sit there and suck up the disrespect that was splashed all over you last Tuesday.

STATIC?

And please, dismissing as “static,” sincere and well-founded concerns about the manner in which (not the substance of which) this issue of constitutional change was carried, is to demean the pedigree of the very office it hoped to enhance. Now the controversy has descended into personal invective, the tainting of the entire department. From now on people will think of the DPP’s office as beholden to a discredited political directorate. How does good come out of that? Delroy, aren’t you responsible?

POLICE IN TURMOIL

The administration is exhausted. Because without any real commitment to wean boys from gang culture or even to catch and convict the current marauders, there is neither comment nor alternative stated in relation to the now settled court judgments disapproving the states of emergency once the ace in their crime-fighting quiver.

All we get is the peevish over-reach in scape-goating Corporal James, as if deposing him will stanch the scorn and discontent of the squaddies on the beat. For those of us with long memories, the Police Federation’s eruption was normative, not exceptional. They don’t check for the appropriateness of the event.

After all, if the constables have been denied their overtime earnings, put to the pain of getting the court to order in their favour and still can’t get their money while the high command’s pockets are bulging, who can blame their indignation? God really help us if, like proper proto-fascists, they attempt some clandestine trial of Cons. James. Law and order depends on the confidence of the public in the security forces. Is this the way to build loyalty? What nervous insecurity makes the guineagogs pick fights which they can’t win?

INFIGHTING

There is recurring evidence of ministers turning on each other as when, once again, Warmington can grossly traduce Bartlett; when Parliament can be truthfully described by even the mild Gleaner as descending into a “circus” without correction from speaker, rime minister or whip. A damn expensive circus it is now too! Look at the television footage. Almost no MPs turn up for committee meetings; another swath don’t even bother to attend regular sittings. They are exhausted and apparently, barren of ideas and prone to give themselves bad legal advice.

WE PAY FOR WASTE

After weeks of being hidden under Tom’s and Marisa’s gowns, just check the audit of the National Works Agency which discloses the corruption of $10 plus billion overruns on a few roads. Note that some of the big road fiascos haven’t been audited yet. Apparently the Works Agency, the National Water Commission and Mines and Geology don’t talk to each other when scoping projects. Then contractors get blank cheques which we have to honour.

Next we are insulted by being told that the South Coast road debacle is going to be overseen by the very competent Mr. Hunter and China Harbour contractors promise to do better. Really? We were expecting the Works Agency was defending the public interest all the time, not just now when things have gone sour.

Who got the big over-run of dollars anyway? Who must the taxpayer look to for compensation? How much of it went as kickbacks to personal and election-time corruption? Has there been a word of reasonable justification?

“They are odious: they have done abominable things, yet they are not at all ashamed, they do not know how to blush, hence they shall be among those who fall” (Jeremiah 8v12)

Nigel gets it! Last week the very powerful Minister of Finance finally acknowledged that the nation is underspending on early childhood education and must move to redress this and rebalance according to means, the amounts allocated to the minority of students who survive the early childhood deficit and make it to tertiary studies.

To effect any such change, Minister is going to have to recalibrate the arrangements with our teachers, offering more money and exacting more accountability from them and all other factors who deliver education.

This will be the hardest struggle the Minister will ever have. The institutions of under-achievement are deeply entrenched. He deserves every support. Properly understood, effective socialization through family, brain builder centres and infant schools, is the key to national security, productivity and human fulfilment.

Arrogance and prideful exercise of power are among the worst sins of any regime. They come before the fall and invariably lead to jerky, arbitrary and cruel actions. The signs of all that in Jamaica today are unmistakable. It was Confucius who said that “respect for others opinions is more important than achieving a single infallible vision”.

Verbum satis sapiens – A word to the wise is sufficient.

­Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at the UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.