Ronald Thwaites | Build bridges not walls

This was one of the mantras of Pope Francis. It was originally understood as the holy man’s riposte to the then US president who thought that walls and expanded prisons are the solution to migration and anti-social behaviour.

But the Pope’s rebuke could apply to most of us too. Building bridges rather than walls has a deeper application to the use of power at all levels.

Do we use money, politics, office and prominence to empower and facilitate or to obstruct and harm under every imaginable pretext? Consider some examples of how unchecked and unaccountable state bureaucratic and political power builds walls instead of bridges of trust and expedition.

CONTRIVED OBSTACLES

To register a simple certificate there was the request last week for the parties to a marriage to provide a utility bill to “prove their address” when this has already been done. Why? To comply with what law? Not law. Just our “policy”. No reason given. Humbug!

Then there is the Cabinet submission agreed upon more than three years ago by successive ministers to match millions of US dollars donated for education by foreign philanthropists. Processing can’t finish. “We’re very busy.” Donors are beyond frustration and disgusted staff with irreplaceable skills are peeling off to more serious work places.

Delay has brought to the point of failure a scheme to increase land titling. Benefits to inner-city hopefuls are now dashed. “The minister’s constituency projects have to finish first” is the excuse.

PHARISEES

Do you want more examples of the “Sargasso Sea” of dealing with state agencies? It was said of the Pharisees, the law-givers of Bible times, “They place heavy burdens on the backs of people and make no effort to remove them.”.(Matthew Ch 23 v 4). God’s word is alive. It is speaking about the Jamaican condition.

So Prime Minister Holness is correct that increasing salaries is not enough to remedy the malaise that afflicts the citizens’ dealing with the State. But, it can’t be that he is only now finding out what constipation he is presiding over.

Try getting through at a tax office during your lunch time. Try to bail a prisoner on Friday afternoon. Try getting your case for life-enabling compensation tried at the Supreme Court in three years. Tell the guy who has been locked up for five years pending trial about his constitutional right to a prompt and fair process.

HARD TO FIX

Our system of governance is not designed to facilitate high productivity and there is very little that the prime minister can do about it. Jobs are “permanent” so accountability is virtually non-existent. Those who are paid to be facilitators have become bouncers or prison guards. Ask any lawyer or businessperson. Of course there are exceptions, but they don’t represent the norm.

Dr. George Eaton used to snap back at my concerns telling me that sloth was a characteristic of all bureaucracies and that it was the same in the private sector. Well maybe, but it’s money taken involuntarily out of our pockets which is used to afford the under-performing public sector wage bill. There is simply no national spirit to advance urgent, comprehensive development.

Nigel fixed their wages. He did not engender an ethic of high performance. Andrew seems to have found that out now.

EDUCATION ROADBLOCK

No government can, by itself, mandate the necessary reforms of the public sector. It would be political suicide. In education, for instance, no thorough transformation is possible unless the contractual relationships with teachers are reconfigured. For all its merits, the Patterson Report skirts this issue as does the imminent Jamaica Teaching Council Act. It requires cross-party collaboration and country-wide buy-in for that to happen.

BULLY-ISM

In this climate of stalemate would-be autocrats build walls of arrogance and change from being governors to corrupt bullies. Look at what President Trump is doing to the universities, the law firms and the rules-based world trade system. Even the prescriptions of courts, the last bastion of individual freedoms are treated with defiance and contempt. Law becomes what the Caudillo wants.

Internationally, consider how Israel and America, having failed to completely destroy Palestine by warfare, are now using starvation to complete the decimation.

LOCAL TRENDS

Locally, the administration dares to order the Electoral Commission around and despite giving the court an undertaking not to proceed with the Portmore gerrymandering, next day gloats that the law has been gazetted and signed by the disappointingly hapless Viceroy of the King. How close can you sail to contempt of court? And to obtain what mess of potage?

IN CONTRAST

Pope Francis set his gospel-suffused teachings and his personal life style against what he called “the globalisation of indifference”. He warned that there was an abundance of Pontius Pilates who wash our hands in the face of injustice and unnecessary suffering.

The outpouring of respect and admiration for Francis, even in non-Catholic Jamaica, points to the recognition by believers and non-believers alike, of his genuine and basal humanity which shone forth beneath all the scar tissue of distraction which the world creates. Though remote to most of us, he radiated a spiritual aura deeper than normal in conventional relationships. Even Trump and Zelenskyy seemed to achieve some comity as they mourned him.

At his core he showed the world how to have deep respect for all life, particularly human life, because of its divine origin and potential. He rejected none, but the gratuitously cruel and destructive and even those were offered mercy, not judgment if they would repent.

His mission was to build bridges, not walls. What is ours?

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