We fully understand Prime Minister-designate Bruce Golding's desire to keep a lean and trim Cabinet, but we don't think that he should indulge in a numbers game.

It would do no good for the country were the new administration to proceed on the basis of a preconceived notion that the smaller the Cabinet, the better.

We would strongly suggest to Mr Golding that he should first look deeply at what his administration will have to do to get this country moving again, and on that basis decide what size the Cabinet should be.

Truth be told, the idea of a small Cabinet arose at a time when it was widely felt that positions were being created in order to reward party loyalists, and not necessarily because of any larger vision and thinking about where the nation was going.

So if Mr Golding was minded to do likewise - and we have no reason whatsoever to think he is - then he would certainly need to think again.

In the same way that we don't want to see a large, unwieldy Cabinet, we equally don't want to see too tiny a Cabinet that it could not realistically do the work that is necessary to deliver what was promised on the election campaign.

We note that the Constitution sets a minimum Cabinet of the Prime Minister and not less than 11 ministers. This was early 1960s. The founding fathers wisely left room for future governments to fashion Cabinets of a larger size, in order to meet the imperatives of the times.

Forty-odd years on, Jamaica has grown in population, but more importantly, the sophistication of the state has deepened as it sought over the years to identify and meet the needs of our emerging nation.

To begin with, no government has ever been able to adequately fulfil the needs of the country, largely because of a lack of resources, but also because of a serious lack of qualified manpower.

One obvious area is government waste. The Rex Nettleford Committee of the early 1990s, followed by the Douglas Orane Committee, identified waste of resources in government departments as one of the biggest shortcomings of the state bureaucracy.

And even though Nettleford suggested no more than 11 Cabinet posts, it was clear that the lack of manpower to see to the implementation of the recommendations of both committees was one of the factors leading to the failure to put a serious dent in the issue of waste.

To this we should add corruption in government. Due to a lack of will, as well as a lack of the necessary manpower at the highest levels of the executive, no administration has been able to tame the monster of corruption.

The argument for an adequately sized Cabinet is really impatient of debate, when we consider the globalisation of the world that has given rise to a ton load of issues, all of which are crying out for attention and none of which can be ignored, unless at our peril.

To all the old issues, we must now add new ones brought on by the emergence of a new set of economic superpowers; more pressing environmental concerns; the upsetting of the traditional trading patterns internationally; the spectre of international terrorism, the danger posed by the international drug cartels which are threatening entire nations, and a whole series of similar issues which we cannot escape.

What we are really saying is that it is not size that matters.

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