Politics of poverty
Jamaica is very much at home and usually a star performer when member countries of the United Nations get together to revel in the sweet but meaningless science of speechmaking. True to form and tradition, Prime Minister Bruce Golding did not disappoint at the recently concluded 5th Session of the General Assembly of the UN General Assembly in New York which brought together the leaders of some 192 countries to discuss new approaches to fighting world poverty.
His polished presentation centred on the Millennium Development Goals, a set of statistical targets linked to the internationally agreed development agenda with the overall goal of eliminating the worse forms of poverty by 2015, which were originally adopted at the unusually productive 2000 Millennium Summit. The central thesis of this year’s Millennium Development Goal Summit could be summed up in a single sentence from Mr Golding’s presentation. “Make no mistake, without an emergency programme to re-energise the MDG agenda those targets will remain elusive in 2015 and beyond.”
Mr Golding missed a paradigm-changing opportunity. Instead of regurgitating the worn argument of Third World indebtedness and what the rich countries should do to extricate bankrupt economies such as ours from a fate of our own choosing, he could have held up Jamaica as an international benchmark or best practice in the fight against poverty. To do that with integrity, the prime minister would have had to start shortly after he assumed the position of chief servant to implement the strategy set out in the Road Map to a Safe and Secure Jamaica, a study commissioned by him and produced by the so-called Special Task Force on Crime (STFC) when he was yet Leader of the Opposition. The relevant section from the study follows.
“The STFC proposes a National Council for Community Transformation (NCCT). Properly conceived and implemented, such a body could effectively coordinate efforts toward addressing some of the vexing economic and social problems that give rise to crime and violence, restructure the fractured relationship between government and civil society and strengthen national capacity towards meeting the country’s obligation under the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
“The MDGs commit Jamaica to achieving a set of minimum targets by 2015. Of particular interest to this committee are the targets relating to the following goals: Demonstrate commitment to good governance, development and poverty reduction; achieve significant improvement in the lives of slum dwellers, and develop decent and productive work for youth. Connecting the fight against crime and violence to the MDGs and the wider efforts to reduce poverty, youth unemployment and inequality ensures high priority among policy makers; allocation of the necessary resources, and support of the international development and philanthropic communities.
“Working through existing national and grassroots organisations (NGOs and CBOs) the NCCT could serve to empower the affected communities, providing them with the technical and research capabilities for social policy intervention and for tracking and measuring outcomes; integrating the actions of the social partners; identifying resource constraints; attracting international donor resources and the philanthropic dollars that are available locally and internationally. Most important, such an institutional arrangement could provide the capacity and expertise to solve some of the country’s most pressing social and economic problems, which are themselves the most grievous and resistant root causes of crime and violence.
“Specifically, the NCCT will perform the following functions: develop and execute joined-up approach to social policy intervention; integrate actions of all social partners; mobilise state and international resources, philanthropy and volunteerism; establish key performance indicators to measure and track progress nationally and at the community level; mainstream lessons learned at prototype and pilot stage; upstream lessons learned through community interventions to influence national social and economic policy; lobby for legislative changes, for example, simplified system for registering and providing tax incentives to charitable and philanthropic organisations.
“The NCCT must be seen as the government’s boldest move yet to marshal resources and to place them at the disposal of targeted communities. Such an action will effectively communicate an intention by government to make major and continuing investments in the social services sector. An initial investment by GOJ is anticipated. The final design of the NCCT will incorporate financial sustainability features, mainly through mobilisation of institutional and philanthropic resources”.
Reciting the recommendations from the Roadmap to a Safe and Secure Jamaica brings me no pleasure. It leads to two inescapable and painful observations. The first is that the ideas of how to solve Jamaica’s economic and social problems have been studied, documented and shelved. The second is the practice of some politicians who continue to portray Jamaica as a poor and underdeveloped country in the hope that it will bring debt forgiveness and more foreign aid.
The imbalances and even unfairness in the world’s economic system cannot be discounted as a cause of poverty in some countries, but the problems that keep Jamaica mired in poverty and social disarray are not imposed by some external force. Our problems have “Made in Jamaica” written all over them. Having played the central role in creating the economic and social quagmire in which we find ourselves, our politicians often wear the Third World, underdeveloped label as if it were a badge of honour. At home they lump the masses into a general purpose category called “little people” or the “little man”. In their usual way of politicking they use language that gives the impression they understand them better and love them more than anyone else. This is the politics of poverty.
hmorgan@cwjamaica.com