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.