THE EDITOR, Sir:WE HAVE been talking about increasing MP's salaries, that we should give them better physical infrastructure in which to work and we will attract a better quality parliamentarian. Gee. The formula should work, then, for just about ANY professional/occupational group in the country.
The problem is, when you raise MP's salaries and give them better physical infrastructure in which to work, how do they then tell the rest of the country to accept poor salaries and sub-standard work infrastructure in the name of economy, restraint, and progress.
Furthermore, when the salaries get bigger, and the rewards more plentiful who do we think will be stepping on and over anyone in his way to get those lucrative MP jobs? Who will be engaging more gunmen to ensure his victory at the polls, the better quality professional?
The logic evades me. Higher salaries, the Mona School of Business-sponsored symposium suggested, will insulate parliamentarians against undesirable pressures. How does that work? People who receive high salaries never want more money, more power, more control?
Yes, but if we pay the people at the top better, then we will get a better quality of parliamentarian who will perform so well that we will have economic prosperity and eventually the bounty will trickle down to the patient ones who waited with ever devaluing wages for the day to dawn.
A word to the wise ones who sponsor symposiums. Only in Jamaica does the law of gravity work in reverse. Deprivation trickles down. Wealth flows up.
We need no symposium to figure out that what this country needs is a different paradigm for leadership, men and women who seek to embrace as their own the realities of those they claim to serve. But then we can only dream.
I am, etc.,
NOVA GORDON-BELL
nmgbell@uwimona.edu.jm
Via Go-Jamaica
