Ronald Thwaites | Doing more with what we have – Jamaica Gleaner
Taxpayers, all of us, ought to be concerned at the superficiality of the process employed to approve the spending of over $800 billion of peoples money this financial year. No individual, no private company would put up with the carefree approach, downright sleazy at times, carried out year after year by the Standing Finance Committee of Parliament.
In a matter of a scant few hours of scrutiny, mostly contestatory rather than explicatory, the money is voted, always without substantial amendment. No matter what has been said during the enquiry, our collective pockets are raided and the Government runs wid it.
It is actually a little better than it used to be. The Public Administration and Appropriations Committee does have a preliminary, but not very searching, look at the expenditure proposed, and members of parliament (MPs) now have somewhat more than a week to try to understand the more than a thousand deliberately opaque pages of figures and narrative about how ministries, agencies and public bodies propose to operate.
The process is frustrating because it is largely pointless. The heavy hand of inertia in the public sector has been working for months to keep things largely as they always have been. Then there are the usually conflated efforts of the Cabinet to introduce new projects.
Some of these recur, unfulfilled or hopelessly overspent, year after year. Words like it is proposed and we are going to recur endlessly. Who remembers that well done is much more to be prized than well said?
The searching questions from whoever is in opposition are side-stepped or rejected. The process is a sham. We need the equivalent of a Boston Tea Party a taxpayers revolt.
Whichever government is in office chronically complains of a lack of resources to do needed things. But all administrations refuse to administer a dose of salts to the heads of recurrent expenditure; to clean out the waste, corruption and low productivity which are embedded and repeated year after year. And MPs are complicit.
More than two years ago, I sought support from colleagues for the introduction of a system of zero budgeting, whereby each line of every years Estimates of Expenditure would be assessed for necessity and efficiency. Take three years and evaluate each ministry, not for financial rectitude as the auditor general does, but for contribution to productivity. Let this process influence who gets or stays employed, how much they are paid, and how we spend what has been taken forcibly out of peoples pockets. Once done, start the process all over again.
Thats what public-sector transformation should mean, and successive administrations are afraid of the idea. It is very likely that this Parliament will be prorogued and the resolution falls off the Order Paper without even a debate on the issue. Shame!
My estimate is that there is at least a quarter of the recurrent expenditure which will be wasted, stolen or could be much better used. The minister of finance has more than an inkling of the extent of the problem. I doubt if he has the courage or could muster the political support to correct it. I wish he would prove me wrong.
Think of what $200 billion would mean if applied to taxpayers purchasing power, or to debt reduction, or to health and education. Livity would be different. It is within our remit to make it happen. Yet we settle for a noisy, defensive, tribal-inspired surface inquiry and so, witlessly, remain slaves to our unjust past.
Happily, this year, we were able to have a good, spirited conversation about the education budget, tragically inadequate, as it needlessly is. Despite a huge primary surplus, there is hardly anything more for schooling this year.
Peter Bunting pointed out the choice which has been made by the Holness administration to invest in national security rather than in the socialising, schooling and training, which is the only way to stanch crime. There was neither denial nor rebuttal.
Karl Samuda understands what needs to be done, but has been dealt a mean hand by those crafting the Budget. He is chafing that there is insufficient resolve to disturb the existing inadequate narrative. His passion and well-honed management skills impel him to acknowledge the shortcomings rather than being defensive about them. This is a hopeful sign.
But still there will be less than $100 a day to provide breakfast and lunch for the two-thirds of schoolchildren who need nutrition to learn. Nothing meaningful, either, to revive the brilliantly conceived Brain Builders Programme for children from conception to age three or, more generally, for crucial early-childhood education.
The disastrous policy to discourage families who can afford, no matter how much or how little, to contribute to their childs education, persists, although at last, the education ministry says it is being reconsidered. So are the modalities of funding tertiary education. But why is the Budget supporting, without any report of its targets and measured outcomes, the National Education Trust when its very premise was to raise investment for the sector.
Dont even start me on the easy acceptance of the hundreds of millions reported stolen from the JUTC fare box and the brushing over the endless billions of subsidy being sunk in that decrepit organisation. And there is the cruel injustice of denying the Church-run childrens homes and places of safety equal support as given to state-sponsored institutions.
We can do much better with what we have if we are more thorough, bold and clear-thinking in the choices we make.
Ronald Thwaites is member of parliament for Kingston Central. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.
Read more here:
Ronald Thwaites | Doing more with what we have - Jamaica Gleaner