EDITORIAL - A better job for Mr Buchanan

Luther Buchanan, who has the title of a minister of state and has a desk at the Office of the Prime Minister, has, we have been told, been given the task of overseeing the improvement of health centres in rural Jamaica.

This, on the face of it, suggests a presumption on the part of his boss, Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, of an inability on the part of the health minister, Fenton Ferguson, to get the job done. So she has called in her ... well ... heavy hitter.

Except that what Mr Buchanan has hit heavily in the two years that he has been responsible for special projects at OPM, we are not quite clear. That may just be because there have been inadequate reports on his efforts.

If, indeed, Mr Buchanan has skills that are in danger of atrophy in his existing job, we believe that the PM might have given him an assignment of more value, and certainly greater immediacy, than trailing behind Dr Ferguson's technocrats to determine if the leak at a village health centre has been properly patched, or whether it is staffed with the right ratio of nurses to patients.

Of course, this newspaper believes that attention to rural development is important and that appropriate health-care delivery is an important part of the matrix in shoring up rural economies. But the prime minister's special-projects muscle?

The Government's most urgent job is maintaining its, so far, admirable effort at fiscal containment and creating conditions conducive to investment, job creation and economic growth.

With the Government's outsize debt, which it has been forced to bring under control, plus its weak borrowing options, it doesn't have the capacity for the kind of stimulus spending being urged by the textbook Keynesians and opposition policymakers who know better.

declarations are not outcomes

Of course, ideas such as the one to transform Jamaica into a global logistics hub, feeding off an expanding Panama Canal, is potentially transformative. But declarations are not outcomes.

Success, or failure, in logistics will depend on the actions of the private sector, domestic and foreign; whether they consider ours a country worthy of their capital. Which brings us back to our point about creating the appropriate environment for investment, as well as how Mr Buchanan can be put to better use than counting dressing gauze - assuming he is the man for the job.

Despite its improvement from last year's 97th when there were 144 countries in the survey, Jamaica cannot claim its 94th position among 148 countries in the recently released Global Competitiveness Report is the place it wants to be. On that score, there is still much work to be done in fixing the macroeconomy, and education, and infrastructure and health care, where Mr Buchanan has been sent to poke a finger.

But more important to potential investors is the ease with which they can do business in the economy they choose. In last year's World Bank report, we were 94th of 181 countries and 15th of 32 in Latin America and the Caribbean. In paying taxes, we were 168th globally and 29th in our region.

We all know the difficulties in negotiating government red tape. Well, make Mr Buchanan the point man for unravelling these impediments - and the muscle to get the job done. That would be of greater value than tracking Dr Ferguson's footprints.

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