POLITICS DON'T WORK.

THERE has been a thought running through this country that politics do not work and has failed this country. And one just have to look around at the condition of the country and it’s obvious that, that fact is true. For fifty plus years of independence politicians have systematically destroyed the dreams of the citizens of this country. It cannot be anything but by design that the country is left in the state it is in.

Let’s look at the human resources that we have as a nation and analyze how poorly politicians have manage it. From the basic school level right through to university, we have witness the failure of our politicians policies to develop the human resources of this country. When you have an education system that is constructed on the basis of a conveyor belt system that takes a student from grade seven until grade eleven without adequately assessing how much that student has learned throughout those years, can only lead to one thing: disaster. When you have a vocational education system that is predicated upon quantity and not quality, there can only be one outcome: disaster.

Now the question is, why? Why have politicians believe that it must be a policy to keep the majority of the citizens uneducated? It’s simple actually. They do not want an educated populace thinks! Jamaican politics aren't predicated on a thinking populace. It’s just not conducive to it. If the populace understands what governance is all about and what government should be doing for the up-liftment of the populace, then politicians could never make ridiculous promises that they have no intention of keeping, they couldn't buy peoples votes for a dish of curried goat etc., because the populace would be looking at the track record of the Government, its manifesto and how practical those intentions are, and how will those intentions translate itself in real benefit for the country. A thinking population is less tribalized, hence not able to be manipulated by politicians to maintain garrisons and to brain wash people into voting one way regardless of how ruinous that way is to the country. We must understand that education does for the brain what the spirit does for the soul. 

Without a good education system, then politicians will do like Arnaldo did, rack up over a million dollars in phone calls. That couldn't never happen in a Jamaica that is well educated. He would have to pay back that bill and resign from Government forthwith. It’s not by chance why the investment in education is so low, but by design. Let’s look at how the PNP wins election. The PNP base is not the educated class but the poor uneducated, dependent people in this country. Why is it that the PNP positions itself as the party of the poor? If it should try to shift policies away from favoring the poor, it try to help the poor it claims mostly through crash Program me and corruption, it will lose the election. Now look at the polls, that is showing the PNP loosing popularity with the Jamaican public, it Is because the PNP have been forced to abandon certain things they would usually do to waste resources on keeping people poor and dependent on the state, while having to structurally adjust the economy in a way that has increased the suffering on the poor. And to make it worse the love factor and the much talked about political capital that the Prime Minister has, is no longer as potent as before.

Another point to note is how bad this country has done economically. For most of this country lifetime, we have seen the economic barely moving. The only time this country has seen any real growth is from the 50`s through to 1972, when the PNP took power and destroyed the economic base of the country by a whopping 25%. That means, if the economy was valued at 100 $ when the PNP took power by the end of their tenure it valued only 75 $. What that did was to wipe out a lot of the businesses that was here producing goods and services that was been sold elsewhere thereby creating wealth. What about those who claims the growth in the 60s was uneven and the poor was not benefiting? It’s actually very simple. No country on earth that has been industrialized, has ever found a way to actually distribute wealth evenly all at once. What happens is that the wealth is accumulated by the Government in the form of taxes and then spend it on welfare programs, education and other areas that compliments the wages and salaries earned by people that are actually working. The object of economic growth is to employ as much people as possible creating goods and services and earning a salary. Economic growth is not predicated on making everybody rich at once or at all but to make everybody have a chance to be gainfully employed and to better themselves. Now once there is an expansion in the economic base of the country, then employment is going to accrue. Those that criticize the trickle down approach of industrialization should pay attention to what has happen to every communist country on earth, they all have change their economic foundation to capitalism in its full form, and have embraced the trickle-down effect. What is important to note is that the object of capitalism is not to make everybody rich but to create enough opportunities so everybody have a chance to be well off.  In the words of Winston Churchill, communism virtue lies in the “equal sharing of Misery.”

Now the PNP never got that but thought a redistribution of wealth would be the answer to making everybody rich rather than creating the conditions to enable people to work and produce wealth for themselves and the country. We are still suffering from that nonsense today. The 80`s` brought back a recovery and Jamaica started to grow again. Then we had the PNP back in power in the 90`s and set about systematically destroying the economic base that the JLP built that was working. Again economic growth plummeted and debt soared. The appetite for debt become so great that the productive sector was once again marginalize and production slowed to a crawl. What became important to the PNP was winning elections rather than governing properly, and in the words of the Prime Minister at that time PJ Patterson:” this government has presided over the most massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, since slavery was abolished.” What in effect he was saying is that he govern this country in a way that benefits the rich at the expense of the poor.

What that has done is to create a set of disillusion in the minds of the populace that has never been experienced since slavery was abolished. We started seeing the rise in crimes, the rise in dons more than before, and the disintegration of the society. As a Nation, we have seen backward step after backward step that has plunged this nation further and further down the abyss of nothing ness. It has inevitably created the idea that politics does not work and there is but one step to take and that is to get what wants here and now, even if it means murdering somebody to get it.

POOR GOVERNANCE synonymous WITH PNP GOVERNMENTS.

With the recent revelation of Government Ministers and Junior Ministers racking up phone bills that cumulatively reaches over five million dollars, the matter of good governance and prudent managing of public finances have once again re-surface.  

In a time of austerity and” sufferation “of a large majority of Jamaicans it is pure evil to have government ministers been so profligate. It cannot be that while civil servants are been asked to hold strain, while prices are going up and inflation have reduced their purchasing power significantly, these things are happening so frequently. From the SUV`s, the deportation of Abu bakur back to Trinidad, down to this present fiasco, we are seeing a government that claims to be holding strain wasting resources left right and center-and it’s not even election time as yet-god help us when that time comes, and nothing is been done to stop this. What can one junior Minister be talking about so much to rack up a million dollars? What is he calling home to Mars? It’s simply extraordinary. But again it fits the pattern of how the PNP governs. It’s almost expected that the PNP will waste resources in such manner, as it has grown to believe that whatever it does it will not get punished by the electorate. Remember Omar`s infamous run wid it statement?”

Now what does that say about Governance in this country? Let me draw upon something that happen in Japan recently and was all over the BBC. A lady resigned from the Government over the misuse of campaign finances, not public money, but she saw that what she did was not in keeping with best practices in governance and she left. In Jamaica that is not so. What politicians and their supporters do is to find every conceivable excuse to explain it away and at the end nobody gets held to account. That cannot be good governance and cannot be good for our democracy, as people will continue to lose faith in our political system. Look at the voter turnout in the last election and it’s quite obvious that Jamaicans apart from the die hearts are not interested in politics and scandals like these will continue to further erode confidence in our political system. What will inevitably happen is a kakistocracy, as more and more competent people shuns politics, and as we know democracy cannot survive without political representation.

What does this scandal say about the Prime Minister and the control she has over her own Government? As we have seen repeatedly she is a weak leader than has no understanding of what proper Governance entails. She seems incapable of holding her own Ministers accountable, and that has led to a feeling within her Government that it is a free for all. From this news broke, she should have called a meeting of her Cabinet and order these ministers to pay back at least half of the money that has been spent paying down those bills, and order the junior ministers to pay back at the very least 75% of their bill. What that would do is send a signal to these Ministers and Junior Ministers that that sort of wasteful behavior will not be tolerated. But alas that will never happen. She is a sad replica of a very poor leader.

What does that does for the economic Programme? Well it’s simple really. For every dollar that is wasted, somewhere in the budget gets cut as the finance Minister have to meet IMF targets. What that translates into is less money to spend on roads and hospitals etc. that is in a mess. How can we as a Nation hope to make it as a first world country by 2030 if our politicians continue to waste scarce resources? For politics to truly deliver, it has to be manage prudently. Our politics is nothing but a cess pool of nastiness, wastage, corruption and incompetence.

Without a radical realignment of our political priorities as a nation, we are going absolutely no where. The PNP needs to be punished by the electorate very badly next time around so they can understand that we own Jamaica and not them.