Governing in the public interest

Martin Henry, Contributor

The youths have turned upon the minister with responsibility for them - and then upon each other. But why should there even be a Ministry of Youth? And, logically, where is the Ministry of Children, of the Aged, and of the age group in-between? We do have a growing child sector in government and one for gender, which really means women.

Democratic governance the world over - Jamaica no exception - has degenerated into a cobbling together of vociferous sectoral interests in which the noisiest and the most organised can get what they want. Meanwhile, the public interest goes to waste.

Government was invented specifically to look after the public interest. Indeed, constitutions like ours repeatedly say so. But what is the public interest? While difficult to define with precision, the public interest is largely constituted of those common things which all citizens in the polity can have access to as a matter of right and can use in their own lawful ways to pursue their self-interest.

Let us take the youth case as an example. What do the youth need most which is common to the needs of other citizens, regardless of age? Absolutely, the number-one need is for the security of person and property, without which no other right as human and citizen makes much sense. And the number-one duty of government and the state just happens to be the security of citizens.

Young males in this lawless country face the brunt of violent crime. And crime affects the children and females attached to the preponderantly male victims and perpetrators of crime. It affects the communities to which they are attached, crippling local economic opportunities and social relations. And, ultimately, crime affects the nation to the tune of some seven per cent of its GDP and the curtailing of its development prospects.

Significance of slashing crime

Just think of how many more resources could be freed up for real economic growth and social development if the crime burden could be slashed in significant and sustained fashion.

But what do we find instead? The national security and justice systems are severely understaffed and underresourced and stretched far too thin for effectiveness. The minister of national security himself has admitted that the police force needs hundreds more officers to fill spaces in the old establishment, not to mention the need for dramatic expansion to match the present crime threat to the security of citizens.

Meanwhile, the commandant of the Jamaica Police Academy told the Monday Exchange of the Observer that there are some 4,000 applicants - about half the numbers of the present force - waiting to join the constabulary, most of them women and many with university degrees, and all of them youth.

Usually tight-lipped judges have broken their stoic silence to complain to a Gleaner staff reporter about the Government's tardiness in providing them with adequate resources to perform effectively. Judges are short-changed on everything from wigs and gowns (which they are obliged to wear on the Bench) to the replacement of their motor cars. The Bench is severely short-staffed. Meanwhile, there are an estimated 40,000 backlog cases in the justice system which, like the Augean stables, will require the labours of a Hercules to cleanse. And people are turning away from the justice system to settle their matters by alternative means, which is not an insignificant contributor to the crime problem.

While articulate and educated youth leaders were seeking to convince the Gleaner Editors' Forum about just how bad their minister was (The Gleaner walked away unimpressed with the 'Shallow discourse on youth', according to its January 27 editorial), the vast majority of Jamaican young people are unequipped to seize even the few opportunities available. Many of them do not have even basic literacy skills. The vast majority of them do not have enough CXC passes for entry-level jobs requiring a good basic education or for accessing tertiary education. And as the minister of labour himself trots out from time to time, some 70 per cent of the population has no certification for work.

The generally poor education and training of the population, despite the Ministry of Education consistently receiving the biggest slice of the annual Budget after debt servicing, the two per cent HEART Trust levy not counted, is not a youth problem; it is a national disaster.

Sin of governance

What would happen for youth - and for a whole country - if Government focused on properly educating the nation's citizens between, say, age five and 18, for citizenship and for work? The unconscionable wastage of human capital is the greatest sin of governance in this country since Emancipation.

Professor Don Robotham has bounced back with two excellent data-rich Public Affairs pieces, 'The condition of our youth', Parts 1 and 2, in The Sunday Gleaner. A little tweaking of title for improvement might have made it read 'The condition of our people'.

As Robotham reminded us, it is young people, particularly young women, who are bearing the brunt of unemployment. Using the best available data, Robotham wrote in Part 2: "In 1998, the unemployment rate for the 14-29 age group was 26.5 per cent. In 2009, the unemployment rate for the 15-29 age group was 19.8 per cent. However, if the numbers are crunched a bit differently, and one takes a smaller age group (15-24), the unemployment rate then rises to 26.8 per cent, which is the number most frequently quoted in  the press. In absolute numbers, the bulk of the unemployed is in the 20-29 age group (82.7 per cent), with the 20-24 age group being particularly prominent."

But he had just before that noted - and this is central to the point I am making in this column - that, "It is reasonable to conclude that we have at least two, possibly three, generations of families who are long-term unemployed and/or have never worked. In other words, we have a situation in Jamaica in which for significant numbers of young people, they have never worked, their fathers have never worked, and possibly also their grandfathers have never worked. We are facing a deep process of social stagnation and decay here."

This Government came to office promising "jobs, jobs and more jobs". We all know the fallout from the global recession. But too little has been done for jobs. Just as I have been advocating slicing off pieces of sectoral budgets to boost inflows into the foundational public-interest areas of security and justice, I have been calling for a public-works booster for job creation. Entire budget lines, like that for youth, could be scrapped.

The fact of the matter is that if there is going to be any significant mopping up of unemployment, as is where is unskilled and semi-skilled, but useful and productive, work will have to be created on a substantial scale.

And there are excellent possibilities, even under the severe budgetary constraints the country faces. The road-maintenance programme which has morphed into the Jamaica Development Infrastructure Programme (JDIP), with its own dedicated fund from the special consumption tax (SCT) on gasolene, should be creating jobs across the country now. The country made a good-faith pact with the Government over the increase of the SCT and did not riot. The money due must be paid over to the Road Maintenance Fund and used for that purpose. Everybody uses roads.

Inner-city renewal

A massive inner-city renewal programme at comparatively low cost can have the dual effect of creating useful work and aiding degarrisonisation, if the Government is serious about both job creation and degarrisonisation.

Environmental protection through clean-ups, reforestation, river training, and so on, offers rich possibilities for low-cost, unskilled work. The new Charter of Rights is offering environmental rights. And, as Robotham has reminded us, construction is the biggest absorber of low-end labour. There is a desperate and chronic need for houses while the National Housing Trust sits on billions of dollars from contributors. I am too much of a dunce to understand why this public agency cannot be made to pull out all the stops and use the money to launch multiple thousands of starter homes which contributors in the low end of the market and who are now excluded from benefits can afford and will complete, little by little.

And coming back to education, instead of fooling around with a handful of high-cost literacy specialists, the Government should recruit highly literate unemployed people, train them old JAMAL style and let them loose in the school system and workplace to clean out illiteracy through small group teaching at stipendiary rates.

There are several pools of funds outside the Consolidated Fund of the Budget which could and should be creatively tapped to drive this work and development programme: The Tourism Enhancement Fund (TEF), the Universal Access Fund (UAF), the NHT Fund, the HEART Trust Fund. These are public monies to be used in the public interest within the law. The country is facing a crisis of large economic and social dimensions and must take radical action, using the resources at its disposal.

All the work programmes must be tied to education for literacy and for work skills and life skills and should have a compulsory savings component. As Robotham so well puts it, "The truly crucial point to recognise is that no significant improvement in the skill levels of our youth is possible without, at the same time, raising their general level of literacy and numeracy."

Governing in the public interest, recognising that the fundamental role and purpose of government is to protect the rights and freedoms of all citizens, is good government for all.

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