Mandate from the poor

New Year. New Government. Same old problems. Same narrow set of policy options for dealing with the same old problems.

But this is not any old New Year. This year marks the 50th anniversary of Jamaica's Independence. One of Bruce Golding's last official acts before demitting office as prime minister was to launch the planned programme of activities for Jamaica 50. Once the passions of the present are past, history will be kind to Bruce Golding as one of Jamaica's great early prime ministers who deeply understood the fundamental problems of post-colonial Jamaica in its first 50 years of Independence and who set about, in a hostile domestic and global environment, to begin to rectify deep structural deficiencies impeding the country's development potential, some of long historical vintage, others more recent creations of the failures of governance in Independence.

As the country negotiated Independence with the British authorities, Premier Norman Manley, with two years left in the five-year mandate given to his party in the 1959 general election, felt it necessary to give the Jamaican people the electoral option of deciding whether he and the People's National Party (PNP) or Bustamante and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) should lead the country into Independence, which was set to commence on August 6, 1962. In the April 10 election of 1962, voters resoundingly chose Bustamante and the JLP. It is perhaps, therefore, sweetly fitting that the people have handsomely chosen Norman Manley's party to lead the country into its 50th anniversary of Independence.

This is not any old new Government. The governing PNP has surprised the whole country, including the scientific pollsters, and itself, with a strong majority, but not an overwhelming majority like the JLP's 51-9 of 1980, or the PNP's response of 52-8 of 1993. Are all the analyses of the reasons for the win for the PNP and the loss for the JLP now in?

This is the first Government on a 63-seat Parliament. While Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller has exercised options for a strong Cabinet, there are enough MPs left over for a robust government backbench and opposition side. A vigorous Parliament of the people's representatives, boldly shaping policy and Budget and overseeing the executive drawn from it, is an absolute necessity for effective and productive governance of the country.

Prime Minister Simpson Miller can use her strong majority for parochial partisanship or for orchestrating a broad and bold vision for national development in the interest of all the people, recovering lost time and lost ground in the independence journey. By partisanship, I don't mean the more rabid kind of preferentially giving party people work and position and entire housing schemes and fixing the roads and building schools, training centres and health centres in constituencies held by the party in Government. Sharp criticisms of the JLP abuse of the JDIP almost certainly helped to bring Mrs Simpson Miller and the PNP to power. They have little option of going back there.

But there is the insidious and damaging partisanship of the party listening only to itself in the Parliament, behaving as if all wisdom resides within it and conducting parliamentary debate and policy formulation as a tit-for-tat point-scoring fight in which superior numbers are used to crush the other side, and its own backbench of the people's representatives is silenced and forced into mindless support of the executive.

'run wid it' relaxation

There is the partisanship of conducting Government with the overriding intent of positioning the party to win the next election, even if policy and legislation are damaging to the economy and to the society. So we have had in recent memory a 'run wid it' relaxation of fiscal discipline to win an election. And we have had the removal of fees in the state health services and of cost-sharing in secondary education for political reasons against counterindication of the negative economic impact of these actions.

Hundreds of examples of such pernicious partisan policies, going back to Independence, can be compiled: the wreckage of a public transport system in the 1980s with a policy of the little man with one bus operating. Unaffordable free education in the 1970s and the squandering of the bauxite levy on housekeeping. The massive expansion of second-rate junior secondary schools in the 1960s. The retention of Air Jamaica and other lossmakers and the reacquisition of the sugar estates in the 1990s.

And all the way through, from day 1, the distortion of the tax system which now has some 200,000 special-interest waivers in it; the accumulation of debt without payback development; and policies which have sucked value out of the Jamaican dollar almost ninetyfold since the currency changeover in 1969.

Portia Simpson Miller, Mama P to the masses, has come back to power on a wave of popular demand for a government of benefits to relieve the pressure on the poor. It is perfectly true that so many Jamaicans do not have to be so poor and unemployed and economically marginalised. Their condition is not any unavoidable imposition of history, or of colonialism, or of external conditions. A quick look just around our immediate Caribbean neighbourhood will reveal many mini-states with far fewer resources than Jamaica has which have done better for their people.

The condition of our economy and society is very much a function of our politics and governance in the first 50 years of Independence.

The pressure on Mama P to provide for her many children, the poor, will be enormous. Resisting that pressure will be enormously important in injecting greater equity into the economy, and the society generally, in the sharing of burdens and benefits.

The poor will disproportionately benefit from structural changes which benefit all Jamaicans and more so than they will benefit from special programmes. A low-inflation environment and a stable currency will benefit the poor more. Inflation, it is said, is the cruellest tax, and it hurts the poor more.

A low-crime environment will benefit the poor more both in terms of personal security and economic opportunities. And the general defence of constitutionally guaranteed human rights, including the dismantling of garrisons, will disproportionately benefit the poor.

A reformed tax system with a universal net and lower rates will benefit the poor more as consumers, as savers and investors, and as small-business operators. Debt management and a reduction of the debt burden will benefit the poor more in freeing up more revenue for social services and a social safety net. And so will a reform of the public-sector pension scheme transferring more of the burden to workers themselves and away from the public purse.

advancement opportunities

An education system which works better will provide more opportunities for the advancement of the children of the poor. Wealthier parents can afford prep schools which prep their children for the best free high schools. Edwin Allen, as minister of education way back in the 1960s, had to introduce the affirmative action 70:30 ratio in favour of more primary-school Common Entrance candidates being awarded places in high schools - and this while junior secondary schools, "built by labour", were going up to accommodate the far more numerous 'failures'.

Lower energy costs, and the planned removal of GCT from electricity bills, do not count, will disproportionately benefit the poor as domestic consumers, commuters, and small-business operators. A reduction of corruption and an increase of cost-benefit efficiency in the public service will benefit the poor more.

None of this is to say that carefully targeted special intervention programmes, such as PATH established by the last PNP administration and JEEP promised by this one, to provide some enabling assistance to the most vulnerable, may not be both necessary and useful. But changing the game for the poor is more necessary and more beneficial.

This is not any old new Government. On nomination day, the prime minister was 66. She will be 71 when the next general election is constitutionally due. This is Portia Simpson Miller's final hurrah as head of the Government of Jamaica and president of the People's National Party.

formidable politician

She has, for nearly four decades, been a formidable politician. Sworn in as prime minister at the start of the 50th-anniversary year of Independence, the opportunity, indeed the solemn responsibility, now is hers - finally - to be a monumental statesperson orchestrating and leading a clear vision for a better Jamaica. The kind of vision articulated in the Jamaica Five-Year Independence Plan, 1963-1968, begun by the pre-Independence Manley Government and built upon and launched by the Bustamante Independence Government, but then sidelined by the politics of the country and still far from being realised. The kind of vision projected in the current Vision 2030 National Development Plan initiated when Mrs Simpson Miller was last prime minister and completed by the Bruce Golding Government, a plan benefiting from wide and deep consultation.

Over the first decade of the 21st century, the Reform and Development Agenda for Jamaica has achieved national consensus. The critical problems are agreed. The narrow options for solutions are clearly understood. Andrew Holness, 'Baby Bruce', as prime minister briefly, was widely criticised for his policy of continuity. Now that the heat of electoral battle has dissipated and the dust has settled, with no vanquished, an effective Portia Simpson Miller Government will have to be a government of continuity with that consensus.

Martin Henry is a communication specialist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and medhen@gmail.com.