EDITORIAL - Bureaucracy stifling Jamaica

Mr Milton Samuda, the president of the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce, is entirely correct in his diagnosis which, by and large, has been confirmed by Mr Reginald Budhan, the permanent secretary in the commerce and investment ministry.

Civil servants predicate their case for overarching bureaucracy and red tape that the private sector is overrun by thieves and brigands, whose primary intent is to rob the public treasury.

Or, as Mr Samuda put it elsewhere in this newspaper, instead of enforcing the laws against the minority of businesses that behave corruptly, civil servants evolve more and more documents and processes "which make (doing) business more and more difficult for all".

In the process, the bureaucrats ignore two fundamental points:

That the very ramparts they erect against presumed private-sector brigandry reinforce, and widen corruption, particularly among their own kind; and

That their measures tend to be impediments to entrepreneurship, investment, growth, and, ultimately, job creation.

Indeed, it is not for nothing that Jamaica, on the Global Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Index, ranks 95 out of 139 nations, five places lower than its previous placement. Notably, it is 51 places lower than Barbados and 11 adrift of Trinidad and Tobago, two of Jamaica's partners in the Caribbean Community that, unlike Jamaica, are considered to be in the departure lounge from the ranks of Third World to advanced countries.

And there is, we believe, more than a correlation between the maze of red tape and Jamaica's anaemic economic growth over the past quarter of a century that today translates to unemployment of around 12 per cent, but with large swathes of those who claim to be in jobs being, really, severely underemployed.

Problem exists

Mr Budhan accepts that there is a problem, but that it is not all that bad so as to be "the source of your uncompetitiveness".

Blame the people instead, and their proclivity to corruption: not that the entanglement of bureaucracy invites corruption as an escape.

Prime Minister Bruce Golding knows, and promised to do better. But he appears, unfortunately, to have been captured by that bureaucratic web of dusty dossiers, foolscap reams and notes scribbled in the one-third margins.

Mr Golding had better try hard to escape if he is to lead a Jamaica that is not to be forever mired in poverty and underemployment and their associated ills.

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