Ronald Thwaites | Some questions

These are queries which became unavoidable while listening to or reading the major news last week.

PUFFERY

If the International Monetary Fund is so happy with the state of the Jamaican economy, why aren’t people who live here happy too?

How come everyone is supposed to be employed but there are hordes of youth on the street corners, idling in the betting shops, and more crazed, hungry, homeless people on the sidewalks?

What is the point of comparing the teacher haemorrhage in 2023 versus 2022? Aren’t both instances unsustainable and doing irreparable harm? Shouldn’t we be concentrating on helping institutions like Titchfield School to fill their 22 vacancies and acquire space for all their students?

While fully supporting the exercise of religious liberty in schools, what lop-sided priorities make us pay more attention to what is ON a child’s head than what is IN it: more concern about grooming than about manners, literacy and numeracy?

SELF DELUSION

Why have an inquiry regarding the upskilling of Jamaican workers as the PIOJ is heard to propose, when the answer is already known but ignored as we continue to tolerate the graduation of thousands of poorly socialised illiterates every year?

In the face of mass teacher migration and educational underperformance, why is there no action to remunerate good teachers properly and hold them accountable?

Do we really think that replacing migrating master teachers with rookie training college graduates can advance the skill-acquisition needed for prosperity?

Who is fooling who when at one good-good primary school which I know well, the parents are told that it is government policy that they need not contribute while the school has to find 60 per cent of every child’s auxiliary fee to provide something as basic as security?

CONCERNING JUSTICE

Why is it that in the context of chronic levels of crime, news is splashed almost triumphantly about plenty arrests – but very few convictions?

Can you please direct me to any place in Jamaica where serious thinking is taking place to understand why young men gravitate more and more to gangs and action to do something about it, other than locking them down and killing some?

What moral authority do our parliamentarians have to encourage sacrifice and nationalist zeal when they have engorged themselves to an undeserved level? Which general feeds himself first and leaves his foot soldiers to scrounge?

What is the continuing logic, nay merit, of Jamaica Labour Party legislators sucking up to predatory banks and opposing Fitz Jackson’s unrelenting efforts to relieve helpless customers?

CROSS PURPOSES

How will the University of the West Indies (UWI) and University of Technology (UTech) be funded when there is the inevitable recalibration of the education budget away from institutional grants and towards early childhood and primary education?

What is Daryl going to do now that he seems to get it that much of the chaos on the roads, lost productivity and wasted energy are because a whole heap of drivers bought, rather than earned, their licences?

Given that we are already paying for about $10 billion of JUTC losses each year, what is the point of huge capital expenditure on new buses which will likely run at a further loss because the same bus company, encouraged by government, has given licences to private operators thus ensuring, as sure as night follows day, that big buses will always suffer from congestion and the almost complete sell-off of their only source of revenue – passengers!

Why does a promising leader like Floyd Green squander his credit by encouraging us to think that we can ride the horses of agriculture and strip mining at the same time? Doesn’t he see what is impossible to deny: that bauxite mining brings about the devastation of soil fertility and environmental integrity? What perverse thought process occasioned the twinning of those portfolios?

Who is in charge of any effort to improve and expedite customer satisfaction in the public’s dealing with the hydra of state bureaucracy? Isn’t it true that we forfeit more than two per cent GDP growth every year just because of unnecessary delays and the corruption normalised in many MDAs?

How come after substantial salary increases, public servants are still bawling? How come after the vulgarity of high, self-donated pay hikes, most committees have atrophied and sittings are poorly patronised by parliamentarians?

Can the very valuable Access to Information Act be neutered by a state agency claiming to be investigating a matter interminably and so contrive a basis for refusing information? Is the unexplained Rio Cobre pollution issue a prime instance of this?

Since even members of their own committee are admitting publicly last week that the much-needed Constitutional Reform process is a damp squib, why not be honest with ourselves about that, wheel and come again; this time with an approach genuinely aimed to teach people what a great thing having a constitution is in their lives and coaxing from them how they would like to see it made better?

TOWARDS BALANCE

Simone Weil once wrote. “If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter side. We must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides so that justice does not become a fugitive from the camp of conquerors.”

Questions like those posed here (and others), rising up from a week of national life, display imbalance and dis-ease among us. They require answers through discourse and consensus if that shared sense of equilibrium, the prerequisite as well as the product of real community can be achieved. That goal gives purpose to, even as it transcends individual interests. The pursuit of mutual flourishing is the opposite of the oppression and selfishness which abounds.

Who amongst us is seeking this rather than “going after empty idols and becoming empty ourselves”? (Adaptation of Jeremiah Ch.2 v.5)

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at the UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.