Ronald Thwaites | On judgment

The Standing Finance Committee of Parliament will soon begin its examination of the proposed ways in which nearly $ 1.5 trillion of your money and mine is going to be spent.

Although we don’t perceive it, the annual budget exercise is a sacred time where elected representatives decide who will live or die, who will be fed and decently housed or remain half-starved and insecure; who will be well educated or remain illiterate, who will flourish versus the majority who will be denied their reasonable aspirations as humans and citizens.

It is that serious. It is the supreme duty of all the “Honourables” armed with their good intentions, fat salaries and questionably-earned preferment to interrogate the value of each line of expenditure; to ask insistently and reverently what their constituents are getting in return for this invasion of their mostly meagre bruk-pockets. It is their money, not JLP or PNP money,which is being spent. We have a right and a responsibility to ask as many questions as we want.

Failure or haste to properly examine public expenditure, which includes a huge mortgage in the form of debt to be redeemed by our children, requires the greatest care. Abdication of this responsibility by any MP should be a ground for impeachment if we were serious about governance.

ZERO BUDGET

My conviction is that at least a third of every national budget since independence has been either squandered or could have been more effectively spent. The only way to prevent this or to prove me wrong is to zero budget every ministry, department, and agency of the State over a three year period to test every expenditure against the principle of the common good. Such a process should be mandated in any revised constitution.

Over 60 per cent of this year’s estimates of expenditure is for debt servicing and salaries. Did we get value for the borrowed money? What higher productivity will higher wages yield? What is the optimal way to spend the what-lef?

Here is why we should ask plenty questions. The only road to access the foothills of the Blue Mountains has been rutted and dangerously breached for years. Thousands traverse it daily, losing productive time, incurring cost and risk. The elected representatives, in their manifest impotence, have ignored the predicament although they have the money-bags.

In contrast, young men and enabled citizenry have now come together to repair road and public infrastructure, voluntarily or by a crude “Go Fund Me” mechanism. So if so it a go go, what happen to the taxes whey yu run wi down fah?

If you want more grief, who is going to ask about the incurable financial diarrhoea of the JUTC or the constipation and discredit of the court system where a significant case brought in 2019 “may” finish in 2027! Is it any surprise that neither the public nor the security forces repose much confidence in our justice processes? Our leaders spend money without the expected outcomes being achieved year after year.

SCAMMING OR SKIMMING?

Getting answers to those matters is what good politics is about. Anything less is rank tribalism and temptation for corruption. Scamming is not only the trade of bright miscreants with computers and call lists. The practice can be embedded in the big yellow book as well.

Correcting this requires national resolve. Our political culture, though admirable in many respects, does not help us to achieve this. Current Trumpish tendencies make it ever less likely.

All of us, electors and elected, should heed St Paul’s command to the fractious Galatians: “If you go on biting and tearing one another to pieces, take care! You will end up in mutual destruction.” (Ch 5)

So we all have to watch this budget process very closely. Every international context points to small nations like ours being bullied or seduced to their disadvantage because of our size and internal contradictions.

Big-power hegemony in our hemisphere is resembling the style of Napoleon, Ghengis Khan, or Attila the Hun. As the late Mr Millwood would have described it, “We are in a state of chronic”!

Lap-dog servility on our part won’t cut it for long. Imported pollution and climate change, inevitable now that all US legislative brakes are gone; investments premised on cheap labour; and capital extraction and overweaning militarisation disguised as security, are our reality.

The only antidote is a mindset of unity and communion in diversity in place of the photo-op, mouth-water cover-ups of our fractured political, religious and socio-economic systems and habits. Watch what is happening in this budget process to determine how effective we are in defending inclusive human interests.

STARVING CUBA

What has Cuba done to deserve starvation from the United States who have degraded Cuban levity through the blockade for more than 60 years for daring to exercise their sovereignty? Now is not 1962 and the missile crisis. What morality gives any individual, government, or country the right to tek set on another nation’s life blood?

And what is our position? Is it one of betrayal and craven cowardice? The Cuban people have denied themselves to donate schools, scholarships, and health personnel to us. Now, like the Levite and Pharisee on the road to Jericho, we appear to be walking past them in their distress and fawning over the guy who says “ Venezuelan oil money will be controlled by me”.

This indifference is as culpable as what we do to the Haitians who, like Jesus, fleeing the Herods of this age, we send back to their killing-fields even as we beseech “Eternal Father to bless our land … and keep us free from Evil Powers”…

How are we going to manage on Judgment Day when we are examined as individuals and as a nation on the standards of compassion, justice, and truth, which we show to ourselves and to others?

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.