EDITORIAL - Get rid of the bugbears, Mr Golding

THIS IS what Prime Minister Bruce Golding said during the budget debate in April: "A major bugbear in doing business and investing - the things that are needed to facilitate growth and job creation - is the frustration posed by government bureaucracy.

"It takes too much time to get things done, there are too many unnecessary procedures that have to be gone through, too many forms that need to be completed and too much time to get responses or decisions on simple matters."

Of course, this was not the first time that Mr Golding, like other Jamaican leaders, had made such an observation.

But Mr Golding gave a solemn pledge to do something about it, so that private enterprise could unleash the country's entrepreneurial energy, generate growth and, ultimately, create jobs - the latter being his party's campaign mantra.

There was, for instance, the prime minister's promise of a policy for development projects to be deemed to have been approved 90 days after application, if relevant agencies have raised no objections.

That has not happened. And there remain unnecessary procedures to be gone through to get business done, still too many forms to be filled out and too much time for decisions by government bureaucrats for simple matters.

Mr Golding is likely to argue that he has put mechanisms in train to overhaul the system, and point to the unit he established to transform the public sector, whose work, broadly, we support.

Their effort, though, in so far as available public documents suggest, has focused largely on structural reorganisation of the public sector - such as which agencies might be merged and what might be a better fit with this or that ministry.

That is important.

Impediments

However, as emerged at last week's meeting of Parliament's Public Administration and Appropriations Committee, this does not deal with the immediate, nitty-gritty impediments to business. Fixing these, or as many as possible, does not have to await overarching public-sector reform.

Part of the problem, we suspect, is that after three years Mr Golding, like others before him, has been seduced and entrapped by a foolscap-shielded, regulations-armed public bureaucracy, who perceive their function to be crusaders against, rather than facilitators of the private sector in the creation of wealth.

Mr Golding would do well to break out of this web that stifles not only himself, but the creators of wealth and his own political prospects.

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