Dear Editor,

The radio call-in programme Jamaica House Live with Prime Minister Bruce Golding has seemingly lost its way or has veered away from its intended purpose.

I was in total support of the programme as conceptualised – as an outlet for the PM to interact directly with ordinary Jamaicans to discuss important national issues. However, but for the PM’s opening remarks of each show, it has become mostly a beggars’ or social welfare request programme to satisfy the supplications of individuals.

He can expect to hear requests such as that of the single mother who irresponsibly went about giving birth to five or 12 children for whom she is unable to provide proper care and without any assistance from the fathers of those children.

Though annoyed by the programme facilitating such requests, I can actually understand how many of those people have found the programme appropriate to make their supplications. After all, that is what many of them have come to expect as the principal job or responsibility of our politicians.

During election campaigns in particular, those people can expect their candidates for Parliament to seek to address their daily needs. They can expect to receive money to go drunk at the bar or to get their dinner for that day; they can expect to get assistance to help their children’s school expenses or they can expect the money to help bury their loved ones, and the like.

Those people are not usually appreciative of, or made to appreciate the need for their MPs to provide the opportunities or that framework that will facilitate their empowerment so that they (and not their MPs) can be appropriately positioned to tend to their needs without the direct assistance of their MPs. Thus, the dependency syndrome continues.

As part of the changed course, one would have thought there would be some effort on the part of the political directorate to foster that change in the mindset of our people. Instead of providing our social welfare agencies with greater resources to address the needs of our people, we saw the retooling of the Social and Economic Support Programme into the Constituency Development Fund.

Despite the seemingly good intention of the CDF, I am not a believer in politicians being caregivers. Rather, our MPs should be legislators and actual representatives of the people’s collective interests, and allow the appropriately staffed agencies to deal with those basic needs of our people.

Kevin KO Sangster

sangstek@msn.com