EDITORIAL - Where political pork rubs the road

THERE ARE some important lessons in Minister Mike Henry's politically calcified response to Peter Bunting's concern about how roads are being chosen for repairs and the tangle into which Mr Patrick Wong of the National Works Agency (NWA) tied himself over the same issue.

The most obvious, and perhaps the most critical of these lessons, has to do with the suspicion that arises, and how things tend to go wrong when political judgement has ascendancy over hard, objective analyses in policy formulation. Or, when it appears to.

Moreover, the quarrel highlights just how screwed up public sector management has become in Jamaica, with crooked layers of dysfunctional bodies that offer little, if anything, to the enhancement of governance.

There are few who would sensibly deny that Jamaica's roads are, mostly, in a sorry state.

Poor roadways

Of the 25,000 kilometres of roads in the country, about 17,250 kilometres, or 69 per cent, based on the analyses of the engineers at the NWA are considered to be in poor condition, up from 12,000 kilometres a decade ago. Twenty-one per cent of the roads are considered to be fair, a drop of nine percentage points from 10 years ago. So, only 10 per cent of the roads, or 2,500 kilometres are in good condition.

But it is not just the roadways that are poor. So, too, are the related infrastructure, like bridges, drains and culverts.

The problem, for a long time, is that the country has not had the money to fix roads, which is changing with a US$400 million (J$39 billion) loan from China.

The political opposition, though, is worried that the project is being used as pork barrel ahead of an election campaign, a view to which is loaned credence by the parish-by-parish roll out of the project. This is what in part drives the worry by Opposition politicians like Mr Bunting that the majority of roads up for repair seem to be in constituencies or areas controlled by the governing party.

Little transparency

The problem is that only main roads, or 5,000 kilometres or 20 per cent of all roads, fall under the direct control of the NWA, whose engineers have the luxury of making objective analyses of which should be on the top of the list for repairs. On the other hand, 15,000 kilometres or 60 per cent, are managed by parish councils through the local government department.

So, in the current project, it is the parish councils, which essentially means, the mayors and the local government department, who decide which of the communities get to be at the top of the list. And there is little transparency in this decision-making process.

Moreover, the parish councils are by and large incompetent and operationally ineffective conduits through which political pork is filtered. They are in that sense, the flip-side of the Constituency Development Fund, so loved by politicians, who like to share out taxpayers resources as though it were private largesse.

Herein, we believe, lies an eloquent argument in favour of the long-delayed plan to bring the management of roads under a single, independent agency, which we believe could be the NWA, whose technical expertise would also be influenced by socio-economic concerns.

While we are putting in the road agency, we should at the same time dissolve the parish councils.

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