Sticking in our craw
I DON’T think the government and Opposition appreciate how much ordinary Jamaicans despise their greed in helping themselves to over 200 per cent salary increase while the rest of us are struggling to buy a loaf of bread at over $500 or a bump of yam and one sweet potato for $1,000. Their vulgar excess is sticking in our craw.
Parliamentarians deserved an increase, but nothing so disproportionate to the mawga minimum wage. Then they try to masquerade all this as “prosperity”. We are not going to forget that contempt. Nor can the PNP (Mark excepted) exempt their members from the same criticism.
IMMATERIAL?
This issue is not “immaterial” as a disappointingly crass and callow Minister described another of their excrescences last week. If you tell us by your words or surly silence that your ugly, unrepented meanspiritedness whether towards Ms Curtis or the poor is “immaterial”, you are in fact offering powerful self-description.
Feathering your own nest while disparaging the interests and concerns of the very people who put you where you are, is self-revelatory of a nasty arrogance which most Jamaicans will repudiate. It cannot be good for the national cause when a government so squanders its moral capital.
My colleague Pearnel worries genuinely that the gang culture of Jamaica is beginning to resemble that of distressed Haiti. He may be right. But the fear is compounded when there is similar comparison of our leadership with their kleptocrats.
UNFAIR
The insult becomes injury when those of us who are expected to set example, having secured our largesse without one required iota of increased productivity, then gyp people like the transport operators into accepting a long overdue fare increase, only to come back bawling on their shoulders about the necessity to back-track so as to contain inflation which has already ravaged the pockets of those who once more, without their consent, must subsidise the rich and the corrupt.
For by what imitated presumtiveness could Mr. Newman, t he taxi operator, have committed the thousands of those he dubiously purports to represent, to forfeit their 16 per cent without their consent? And how could any responsible minister negotiate such a reneging of a solemn promise without being assured that approval of all those entitled had been secured?
Was this unjust charade to be tested in a court of contract, what do you think would be the verdict? And do you think that the promised ‘hold-strain’ will be so observed by those who should enforce it as to give the travelling public a real break? That’s a joke Daryll! Either or both of the following will happen: the higher fare will be collected notwithstanding, or more overcrowding, wild driving and corruption will prevail. After all, the bank rates on the car loans are going up, not down: the owner man (read many highly placed officials) won’t be expecting less cash at week-end; nor will the gas price which artfully, goes down a little one week then next week up a lot, be reduced.
IMPROVED JUSTICE
The strategic plan to enable nimbler throughput in the justice system deserves full support. Injustice silently prevails over justice when it takes five years and more to conclude a criminal or civil case through the superior courts.
The threshold of jurisdiction in the parish courts has long been overtaken by inflation. The turgid rules to do with “dead-lef” multiply costs, create billions worth of dead assets and prejudice dependents. It is sheer laziness why these obvious anomalies are not corrected.
IMPEDIMENTS TO EFFICIENCY
The political class, most notably those presently in office, refuse to confront the reality that the inefficiency of service in most areas of the public sector has not been corrected by salary increases. The offices to do with land administration - especially the Survey Department, Stamp Office, Municipal Corporations and, despite excellent leadership, the National Land Agency, are grossly inadequate to deliver the government’s own targets and stimulate broad development.
I thought it was to Jamaica’s advantage to earn more foreign exchange. But if suspicion is aroused when one tries to deposit more than US$500 and there is a fee charged to lodge this money which the bank then “washes” for its own account, this craziness drives any small business person into the informal economy. Those who create these obstacle courses clearly do not know what it is to scramble to make a paybill at month-end.
NO WATER?
One can only i magine the embarrassment and loss to the Negril tourist sector when plagued by water lock-offs. Paying up to $40,000 for a truck-load of stolen water conveyed in a tank recently used to transport sewage, is a shameful disgrace. But how could development approvals have been issued by the plethora of agencies who must sanction them, without requiring the prior availability of sufficient water? Or what kind of chacka-chacka public sector gives permits for events like Carnival without strict prior arrangements for garbage collection and disposal? Such services are so basic that their delivery ought to provoke no public controversy.
MIGRATING SKILLS
The principal of St .George’s College, Mrs. Margaret Campbell’s Letter of the Day, last Friday, outlined the migratory impulses of Jamaican teachers. Every school principal has a similar tale to tell. There is no holding back anymore. Quality outcomes from our schools are being sabotaged even more than COVID-19 caused.
Persons of any calibre, most notably teachers and nurses, are asking Andrew Holness, Nigel Clarke and Fayval Williams how is it that they found hundreds of millions to share out among themselves while, despite the increase they got, all, but the most “high-up” public servants are managing only by virtue of their credit cards or by the grace of remittances.
We have it in our power to do much better for ourselves with what we already have.