EDITORIAL - An illusion of welfare

Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller doesn't need Julian Robinson's committee to provide solutions to the thievery of more than 15 per cent of electricity produced by the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS), or the equivalent of 26 per cent of the power the light and power company sells to its customers. Nor does the junior energy minister need to appeal to Jamaicans for their advice on what to do.

Indeed, as an experienced politician and representative of a garrison constituency, in pockets of which electricity theft is rampant, the PM knows well that the solution is primarily political, resting on two intermingling fronts operating simultaneously.

On the one hand, the institutions whose responsibility it is do so must feel fully empowered to go after the thieves. At the same time, politicians, generally, and the country's political leadership, specifically, must create and pursue a new narrative, replacing the one that perpetuates the idea of cost-free entitlements, upon which our politics is largely built.

The conversation, therefore, transcends the current focus on JPS. It ought to embrace other utilities whose services are often conflated with the automatic provision of social welfare, and find ways to fast-track the end of the politics of zonal exclusion that bred the garrison communities.

PM IN RIGHT PLACE

Mrs Simpson Miller, as the country's leader and the politician with the ability to best communicate with the majority of people corralled into this victimhood of entitlement, is in the right place to lead the transformation. It is an assignment, we assure, from which there are political benefits.

Take, for instance, the issue of energy, with which Mrs Simpson Miller's Government currently struggles. The US$0.42 per kWh at which the JPS delivers electricity helps to make Jamaica's economy uncompetitive. But the stealing of power pushes the price higher than necessary.

By some estimates, between 150,000 and 200,000 households in Jamaica steal electricity, which, if true, would be between 17 and 23 per cent of Jamaican households, or the equivalent of up to 37 per cent of JPS's registered residential customers, who last year used 996,429 megawatt-hours of electricity. So, the JPS's nearly 542,000 residential customers bear the burden for that additional 37 per cent. If the freeloaders paid their fair share, the JPS might have been able to charge customers less, or be in a better position to invest in more efficient systems, to the benefit of consumers and the economy.

NWC ALSO SEEING RED

The National Water Commission (NWC) is another victim of this notion that public utilities are not to be paid for, but compounded by government ownership and complacency and a perception that things owned by the State don't have costs. The NWC will lose J$3.5 billion this year, pushing its accumulated deficit towards the J$20-billion mark. It has long-term debt of more than J$30 billion.

But nobody pays for around 70 per cent of the water produced by the NWC, a large chunk of which is lost in decrepit infrastructure which it cannot afford to replace, but much is given away or stolen in those politically corralled communities where the reward is the illusion of free water, power, health services, transportation, and more, but for which we all pay with the persistence of our poverty.

Julian Robinson doesn't need his dedicated website of community for people to tell him the solution. Nor does Mrs Simpson Miller need him to tell her what to do.

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