Dawn Ritch, Contributor
THE GOVERNMENT'S defense of the Prime Minister's 'Living Large' and his legacy of institutional failure throughout Jamaica has been unbelievable. I wouldn't even have bothered.
His press secretary, Sandra Graham, has been out, and so has the Minister of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Delano Franklyn.
Both of them were voluminous in the pages that they covered, and totally irrelevant in every particular.
If the Prime Minister achieved anything for Jamaica in his foreign travelling it's been kept a deep, dark secret. Our country's international produce agreements are in tatters, and the most anybody can say to us by way of official consolation is 'Hush'. This farce beggars description.
DEEPLY PUZZLING
The sum of $21 million does not include expenses nor accommodation for his official entourage which includes not one, but sometimes two butlers.
Why does he have two? Does he need to be carried? He's not infirm as far as anybody knows.
I know a few privately-wealthy Jamaicans who have travelled in a five-star manner all their lives, and none of them has racked up a bill like that in New York. Bear in mind that these people are typically travelling with their entire families.
They find the Prime Minister's bill over four years deeply puzzling.
Private, high net worth individuals who earn their own money are entitled to spend what they can and wish in foreign travel without the scrutiny of tax payers. As long as they pay their taxes here, what they spend abroad is nobody's business but their own.
When the Prime Minister travels or charters a private plane, it is everybody's business. And nobody, not even the most honourable himself can tell us to shut our damn mouths about it.
Yet he insolently mocked us when he told the nation at the Denbigh Agricultural Fair that the furore won't run him out of office one day sooner, or make him delay a day later. Sixteen years of power have coarsened Patterson beyond imagination.
His son was on the public payroll as an IT consultant, at $2.5 million per annum.
Minister of Finance, Dr. Omar Davies said recently at his PNP canditatorial party meeting in Port Antonio, that this was monkey money.
That had he known Richard Patterson could be had for so little, he would have scraped him up for the Ministry of Finance long ago.
Even though I know that the country's Finance Minister is lost to all reason, I must tell him that young Jamaican graduate engineers, educated at private expense are being paid $1 million annually. And they are actually going to do something concrete and useful. Dr. Davies is suffering from an extreme form of executive isolation.
He said at the same PNP meeting that if anybody in the press or elsewhere brings up his many close relatives on the public payroll it is going to be 'bangarang'.
The broader picture, however, is that it doesn't matter that they are all graduates. It's a very large concentration of one family within the precincts of government and a triumph of the petty bourgeoisie.
These intellectuals believe that the feeding trough will always be full because they don't have to earn their own livings in the private sector.
It will amaze the Finance Minister to realise that not everybody working for a living in the outside world is a financial sector CEO earning $10 million a year or more.
TRYING TO MAKE A LIVING
The vast majority of tax payers are still trying to find a decent job and decent pay, into which he keeps dipping his hand and taking out greater and greater amounts.
I don't know a single soul outside the Government or the Opposition, who would sneeze at a million dollars, much less find 21 million of them going up in smoke unremarkable.
The now retired banker Aubyn Hill who writes for this newspaper, last week pooh-poohed the public fuss about the Prime Minister's travelling expenses. He compared the latter's salary and ministerial salaries to those which obtain in banking.
Mr. Hill must remember that he arrived here after the collapse of the financial sector. All those people earning that either had the case against them dropped, or went into exile and were prosecuted in absentia. The courts still have not reached decisions about their guilt or innocence.
Jamaicans who travel in the style to which Mr. Hill has become accustomed are people of very high and private net worth. They have no shareholders to consider other than themselves, and certainly no tax payers are made to foot their bill in any part of the world, or even subsidise it.
Jamaicans who go into politics ought not to do so on the basis of personal enrichment. They are not CEOs, and they never will be. Nor can we ever be directors on their boards.
They are members of Parliament and parish councillors, and are not supposed to have boards, not for personal enrichment anyway. People have to make a decision either politics or riches.
It is true that many Jamaican politicians have stayed too long in office while thinking about their retirements. But politics above all is about service to the Jamaican people. Politicians should be rewarded by the service they give the country, not by fat expense accounts, big salaries, and siphoned fixed deposits. Their psychic income is power and glory.
In one form or another, however, much of Jamaica's effort over the last decade has been spent increasing politicians' salaries and replenishing their expense accounts. Because of this absurd distraction we now live with a gun at our head.
The only things that grew during this time were violent crime, murder, public debt, and the size of the government feeding trough. That trough has become a thunderous gravy train to which politicians cling for desperate life and more hope to clamber.
Five more in fact. The number of Parliamentary seats is now being expanded by five, with all the attendant increase in waste and corruption. They live high on the hog, while we perish for want of the basic necessities.
