The Prince and the (Pauper) parish council

Martin Henry, Contributor

Prince Harry, third in line to the throne, representing his grandma, The Queen, on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee, arrived here on nomination day for local government elections.

The Bolt-beating, sharpshooting Prince came in a week when a police operation in western Kingston led to the deaths of six people, one more than the five who died in the whole of the British riots last summer.

Harry, the reggae dancer, came in a week when a team from the International Monetary Fund was also on the island and media expended a lot of space and time discussing what exactly Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller had told Bloomberg about a Greek-style bailout for Jamaica.

The fact of the Jamaican state being headed by The Queen has not made the slightest contribution to our national condition of crime, poverty and indebtedness. And getting rid of Her Majesty as head of state will make not the slightest contribution to our peace and prosperity.

And, once again the public acclamation of royalty in Harry-mania has shown how out of sync public interest is with the avant-garde insistence upon replacing a monarch with a president. In any case, in a monarchy-hungry world, the president will quickly be regalised.

Our system of local government is as old as the coming of the British in 1655. People have long forgotten that the 'parish', of which we now have 14 (down from 22 earlier), was both a unit of church administration and of local government administration.

It was comical, to say the least, to hear nominated councillor candidates boldly running up their mouths about delivering development in their divisions. Not even MPs in our bastardised Westminster system which converges power in the Cabinet can do that.

After a couple of decades of local government 'reform', parish councils are down to cemeteries, markets, street lights, fire and minor roads. Have I missed anything? Hardly the stuff of development.

The domination and strangling of local government is clearly evident from the multiple postponements of local government elections which are due every three years. (The last elections were held on December 5, 2007.)

The marshalling of councillor candidates by MPs and constituency caretakers on nomination day just shows whose back pockets councillor candidates are in. The parish council election is nothing more than another national contest of the political parties dominated by central government.

Hole in argument

Some people, including Edward Seaga when as prime minister he was busy stripping the parish councils, have mounted economic arguments against local government. The hole in that economic argument, apart from the substantial difficulty of any direct cost-benefit analysis, is that it begins with the premise that local government is a charge upon central government and the national Budget. The counter-argument is that the reasonable costs of government must be met; local government is vital to democratic governance; and local government should meet its own costs from its own revenue streams.

Far more urgent, far more important, than writing The Queen out of the Constitution is writing local government in, deeply entrenched. Are the anti-monarchical republicans willing to also advocate more powerful and more autonomous parish (state) government along the lines of what prevails in the federal United States and in our good friend, Venezuela, even if not to the same degree?

Parish government needs greater security, greater autonomy, more resources, to be derived from local revenue streams, not as handouts from central government, and more responsibilities. Just take one very visible case in point: Townships across the country, including parish capitals, are generally a disgrace. They fall into the crack between the incapacity of the Urban Development Corporation of central government and the incapacity of the parish councils, and they fall into the ruinate we see all around us.

The requirements and specifications for the serious reform of local government, after more than two decades of backing and forthing, are substantially in place. What is now needed is for central government to stop the hypocritical shilly-shallying and just do it. In Harry's home country, from which we have derived our principles of governance, local government works.

Who to believe?

Prince Harry could hardly have known as he touched down at Norman Manley at 5 p.m. last Monday and inspected the ceremonial guard of honour by the Jamaica Defence Force that six Jamaicans lay dead and others injured only a few miles away. The dead and wounded were the casualties, some of them innocents, of "a running and intense gun battle involving the police and criminals", as the police reported it. Another in a decades-old series.

As usual, precisely what happened has been obscured in the fog of war, with residents and the police peddling contrary stories.

In the aftermath of the bloody operation, the police have come under intense fire, including from politicians. Never before have police operations been so publicly scrutinised, with media in tow and INDECOM bringing up the rear. Despite the excesses of the security forces over time, which should be thoroughly investigated and appropriately punished, I have the deepest sympathy and regard for the personnel in uniform who must place their lives on the line in one of the most dangerous policing environments in the world, and face armed and deadly desperados embedded in protective communities.

Politics and politicians have made enormous contributions to the growth of crime and violence in this country and to its embedding and normalisation in certain enclaves. When the State deploys its security forces against anti-state armed criminals embedded in these political enclaves, state operatives must face the double jeopardy of criminal guns and a hostile community protective of their paramilitaries. There used to be a concept of treason in jurisprudence, betraying one's country and giving aid and comfort to its enemies.

Greg too big for his breeches

The Office of the Contractor General is getting stranger and stranger. In a three-page 'Christiean' media release last Wednesday cautioning "Government and Parliament not to dilute anti-corruption checks and balances in Jamaica's procurement regulatory system", there is this flatly out-of-order statement:

"Tampering with the Contractor General Act, or the Government's Procurement Rules, to reduce the effectiveness of Jamaica's contract-award, implementation and oversight regulatory system, as opposed to strengthening the system, will be viewed as an ill-conceived and misguided step in the wrong direction.

"... Both the Government and the Parliament would be well advised," the OCG lectured, "to focus their efforts on implementing the several considered remedial recommendations which have been repeatedly advanced by the OCG ... ."

The OCG said its "warning comes against the background of statements that were made in the House of Representatives ... by both the opposition spokesman on finance, Mr Audley Shaw, and the minister of finance, planning and the public service, Dr the Hon Peter Phillips."

Far from truth

The language of the release grows even more intemperate and impertinent: Referring to the legislators' expressed concerns, the release said, "Nothing could be further from the truth." And, "Contrary to what the minister and the opposition finance spokesperson have inferred ... ." And, "both Mr Shaw and Dr Phillips are not only obliged to elaborate in clear and unambiguous terms precisely what they were alluding to yesterday, but they must also provide empirical evidence of that which they allege.

"Dr Phillips," the release demanded, "is obliged to explain the glaring inconsistency ... ." And, "Dr Phillips should also be required to publicly rationalise ... ."

Excuse me?

Both parliamentarians were complaining about delays in implementing public projects which they blamed on the cumbersome procurement process. But it is neither the content of the legislators' complaint nor the concerns of the OCG, however legitimate or illegitimate either may be, which is the issue at stake here. It is the breathtaking audacity of an office of the public service to be publicly lecturing the Government and Parliament and issuing directives to the executive and legislature about the operations of the self-same agency.

Every permanent secretary, every procurement officer, every manager of the paper clip department in every public agency has problems with procurement, which is strangling public administration as it seeks to strangle corruption. The procurement system has to be reviewed and remodelled as a matter of urgency to balance the imperatives of fighting corruption with the imperatives of efficient public administration. And that's a matter for the country's legislature, the conflictual and self-praising directives of the OCG not withstanding.

Out of order

The OCG is charged with implementing the law, not making it, particularly through the tactic of public arm-twisting. Despite my personal commitment to the fight against corruption and high regard for Greg Christie and the office he holds, somebody has to tell Mr Christie that he is treading on dangerous ground. It simply is not his business to issue directives to the Government, and more so via the media.

There were 444 road accident fatalities in 1991 and 393 in 1987, 25 years ago. Last year, there were 307. Despite the cries, when the large increase in vehicle density since the liberalisation of imports in the early 1990s is factored into the stats, there has been nothing short of a dramatic decline in road fatalities. The National Road Safety Council and/or media should give us deaths per 10,000 vehicles.

And just like how the Government is allowing crime to kill us, the roads are being allowed to kill us as 'road factors' are behind most accidents in some parishes (The Gleaner, Monday, March 5).

Martin Henry is a communication specialist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.