The need for national policies

The Editor, Sir:

My parents bought a car before they had intended to, more than 50 years ago, as they found that the public transportation system was woefully inadequate. Today, I still do not believe that we have an adequate transportation system to meet the needs of the capital city or the country. While we now have transport centres and some improve-ments which are a welcome addition, there is still an ad hoc approach to planning and implementing the system. I have to ask if there are national policy guidelines which have been conceived and implemented in all facets of national life.

As a country, are we incapable of developing policies which guide our action beyond the five-year windows needed to plan how to win elections and maintain power, how to extend patronage and how to lead the country into rack and ruin. I hope that we realise that the focus should not only be on personalities but, more important, on the policies which lay the foundations for the future, and explain where we have reached. Successful nations have policies which are in the national interest, not in the interests of the few. Policies should drive practice whether in health, education, the environment, national security or economic development.

Sell out everything

Today, the policy seems to be sell what there is left of Jamaica to China; next week it might be to another country. I hope that our politicians and policy-makers realise that weare holding them responsible for both the successes and the failures in public policy. If Singapore, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago can get the policies to work so that there is prosperity, growing economies, and possibilities for the future, why can't we?

The current situation in Jamaica has sent me back into thinking about how we got here and, more important, how we can get out of this deepening economic hole. After all, it takes cash to care and we are constantly constrained by the persistence of the poverty that afflicts so many of our citizens. We are also afflicted by the policies of partisanship, patronage, not production, and a sad poverty of ideas.

I have decided to start saving to visit Singapore to try to see if I can learn anything about a country whose economy is estimated to be growing by as much as 12 per cent this year. Maybe we should be touring Singapore in our thousands to develop a better understanding.

My country needs to take a new start. We are on the wrong road and the further we are going is the 'behinder' we are getting.

I am, etc.,

HILARY ROBERTSON-

HICKLING (Dr.)

Uwi, Mona