Three years after Douglas Orane proposed sweeping cuts in Jamaica’s foreign missions to save money, his recommendations are under fire from the Opposition’s shadow foreign minister.

Apparently, Senator Ossie Harding’s belated attack on the so-called Orane Report was based on a view that the suggestions by the businessman and independent senator are being implemented through the back door – in the form of reduced budgetary allocations to the foreign ministry.

In his presentation to the sectoral debate in the Senate on Friday, Harding, while praising the broad philosophy underpinning Jamaica’s foreign policy, lamented the declining spending on the portfolio over the past seven years – from just under one per cent of the budget in the mid- to late 1990s to less than half of one per cent in the current fiscal year.

“Somebody must have been listening to the Orane Report,” Harding complained.

Orane’s recommendations, he said, were “unsettling, disturbing and disastrous”. It was penny-pinching, he suggested, that would bring little real savings but would undermine Jamaica’s ability to conduct an effective foreign policy in a globalised world.

“If the Orane recommendations, with respect to the foreign service, were to be adopted in toto we would be virtually returned to a colonial territory with someone else having to look after our foreign affairs,” said Harding, who was a junior foreign minister in the JLP Government of the 1980s.

Douglas Orane is chairman and CEO of Grace, Kennedy & Company, one the Caribbean’s largest conglomerates. He was also one of two independent senators appointed by Prime Minister P J Patterson after the 1997 general elections.

The report savaged by Harding on Friday was the result of the work of a committee, headed by Orane, which Patterson appointed in late 1998 to recommend ways to cut public sector waste in the face of widespread criticism of Government operations. Orane apart, the members of the task force were:

. Betty-Anne Jones-Kerr;

. Carol Royes;

. Garth Kiddoe; and

. Devon Rowe.

Its broad recommendations, ranging from renting cheaper office space for government departments to new regimes to providing petrol to government vehicles, it was suggested, could have saved $1.118 billion in the 1999/2000 fiscal year and $2.386 billion in fiscal 2000/2001. The savings would have moved to over $2.5 billion in 2001/2002.

The Orane Report was widely embraced by opinion leaders at the time of its publication and there was no specific criticism by the JLP relating to proposals for the foreign ministry.

Among Orane’s recommendations were for the closure of the missions in:

. Moscow, Russia;

. Lagos, Nigeria;

. Bonn, Germany (the mission is now in Berlin);

. Caracas, Venezuela;

. Mexico City, Mexico; and

. Havana, Cuba.

The total cost of operating those missions in 1997/98 was $134.11 million.

Orane recommended that the missions should be non-resident ambassadors operating from the nearest country with a Jamaican mission.

“In the case of Caracas, Havana and Mexico City, the non-resident ambassadors should be resident in Jamaica,” he proposed.

At the time, those six missions accounted for approximately 21 per cent of the $637 million it cost to maintain Jamaica’s embassies abroad.

“Permanent missions are exceedingly expensive to operate, compared to alternative methods of representation,” the report noted.

It suggested, too, that the issues of pride, politics and career advancement tended to make foreign missions self-perpetuating sacred cows.

Said Orane in the report: “Once a permanent mission is opened there is always massive resistance to its closure because of political considerations, as well as concerns about the perceived effect of national pride and loss of career opportunities. Nevertheless, economic realities do affect the actions of other countries in this regard and Jamaica cannot afford to be an exception…”

Orane proposed, where possible, the bunching of Jamaica’s overseas offices, the sharing of missions by Caribbean Community states and the increasing use of e-mails, faxes, telephones for communication and the hiring of host country staff, as opposed to sending people abroad, for non-diplomatic posts.

In the three years since the Orane Report, only the embassy in Russia has been closed, meaning that Jamaica now has 17 full missions. Jamaica also lists missions in the Dominican Republic and Colombia respectively. But neither has a resident ambassador and the budgets of $260,000 and $1.5 million respectively indicate that while they are politically beneficial, they are hardly full-fledged missions.

Harding, seemingly signalling the diplomatic orientation of the JLP should it return to office after the next general elections, said the Orane Report reflected recommendations “made by persons who are either unfamiliar with the subject matter or fail to make the necessary investigation before advising”.

He, for instance, branded as folly, the closure of the Moscow embassy in a year when Jamaica was elected for a term on the United Nations Security Council, of which Russia is a permanent member.

On the issue of hiring local persons in host countries for non-diplomatic jobs, Harding argued that some functions had a direct bearing on specific management practices in the public service and were not always transferable to locally engaged persons.

There were also issues of enforcing financial accountability on local staff and the fact that in small missions persons holding non-diplomatic jobs were sometimes required to undertake tasks and representational duties “that generally preclude the performance by locally engaged staff”.

“The Government must review the recommendations made by the Orane Committee with respect to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, for they are most inimical to the interest of Jamaica,” Harding declared.