Help us, PJ - leave now!

Mark Wignall
Thursday, October 27, 2005

The route to near total breakdown in government begins with seemingly mundane omissions such as the failure to pick up garbage on one lane in a small community. Then it steps up to a streetlight blown for a year until it is forgotten, then a pothole attaining such status on a road that if you drove on the road and the pothole was repaired, you would miss it for the fun you had while it was twisting the front-end of your car and forcing you into near misses in what could have been neck-jolting accidents.

It then steps up to ministers denying that anything at all is wrong. Positive ministerial pronouncements at that stage become directly proportional to the omissions. Step it up to trees growing in gullies, political strongmen collecting for no work done, politicians attending the funerals of criminals, euphemistically called "area leaders", and politicians on junkets to foreign places with exotic names - the "bed of nails" syndrome.

In the next phase, where the politically linked street toughs are systemically eliminated, the soft-whisper approaches of those who are more intellectually aligned with the political bosses furtively craft the new arrangements until the street has nothing left. The passage from government-directed politics and projects to the "street" proved to be too long and arduous, and there was little guarantee that what was signed off "under the table" would in fact reach back to where its genesis lay.

The desired objective at that stage is a sort of "political short circuit". Whatever arrangements were made at the top, if too many of those in the "correct" political colours were "eating a food" out of it, while no work was done and the people of this country continued to suffer, that would only ensure that not much came back to the source which directed it. In time again, the lesson was learned and the exclusion of the lumpen from the trough became the new paradigm.

What has been taking place in our politics in the last 10 years or so is the replacement of this long passage to the street by a short circuit to "those of like mind". The PNP government has not yet fully appreciated that where in former years government contracts were given out to a fairly sizeable number of genetically linked "small man" political street toughs, the displacement of that approach to now giving two or three or just "one big divine presence" has brought about criminal activity to the point where it now seems uncontrollable.

The harsh reality is that in former years in all administrations, corruption where it related to government contracts was the biggest slice of unwritten government policy. In the 1970s, the Special Employment Programme known as the Crash Programme was never designed to get work done. It was formulated around putting money in the pockets of the poor, preferably PNP poor.

To the extent that that programme was seen to be putting a brake on the enormous pressures facing the poor and hindering them from burning and looting in the streets - where it was informally adopted as policy - all it did was lull the government into a false sense of security and delay once more the formulation of projects geared to development and the long-term assistance of the many communities throughout Jamaica. While the Crash Programme was inherently corrupt (little work was done, not much work was demanded of them), the fact is, it did put food on the table of thousands of poor people.

The sad reality is that today, the same hordes of poor, uneducated people still remain. That cannot be a credit to this administration or indeed the one which came after the 1970s. The politics practised by all administrations where it relates to the poor, the powerless and the undereducated has always been the satisfaction of the immediate pangs of hunger with little stress on empowering the poor for their long-term benefit.

Sad as that type of approach has always been, in the days when "bolo wuk" was being given out either through village contractors or more direct Christmas-work programmes, the small man and woman got their bellyful out of those approaches.

What this administration has discovered is that by giving contracts to too many village contractors, too much work simply ended in rot, cost overruns, shoddy workmanship and political fallout. The administration therefore adopted the "noble" approach of shortlisting its roster of contractors to the point where they could be counted off on the fingers of one hand and the majority of fingers would still be left.

This "noble" approach assumed that large projects would be more easily monitored and accountability would be their hallmark. The result has been that the suspicion of corruption has increased in the society, not just because the few contractors tend to reside in the same headspace and intellectual corner of the administration, but also because a great deal more of the benefits remain with these "special ones" even as the same allegations of cost overruns and shoddy workmanship remain.

It is quite obvious to me that this administration has lost control of its direction, its soul, its mission (if it did in fact have one) and worse, it continues to thumb its nose at the people, even as its friends grow fat and happy while feeling certain that the fancy footwork and the convoluted paper trails will lead only to embarrassment for those who are doing investigations. Their time, however, is coming, and coming soon.

The present PNP administration led by PJ Patterson is in retreat, although it is not a self-imposed one. What left the roost years ago is slowly returning and soon there will be a loud "whoosh" of wings. The party is without leadership and all seem to be scrambling to protect their little neck of the woods.

In 1992, I think it was, the late Professor Carl Stone wrote a newspaper column titled, "The Danger of Electing Mr Nice Guy".

He was, of course, referring to someone called PJ Patterson. Can't say we were not warned!

- observemark@yahoo.com