The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return. Gore Vidal

THAT this benighted Administration is a parasite on the taxpayers of this country needs little debate. I have long canvassed the view that there is no burden-sharing happening in this country. We, the ordinary Jamaicans, are carrying the burdens while the one per cent privileged set and the political theatre masters in power are doing all the sharing — but amongst themselves for primarily themselves. In fact, the Jamaican people are being constantly treated to a cruel game of ‘three card’ by a professional crew of con artists. The members of this Administration continue to live high on the hog while the majority of us suffer and fetch hell in our daily lives.

Just last week — only days after this incompetent Administration gave away four million dollars of taxpayers’ money to transport leader of the Jamat Al Muslimeen, Yasin Abu Bakr to Trinidad and Tobago when he already had a first-class return ticket for fear apparently that Bakr could, maybe, have fomented bad vibes to cause a coup d’etat — we were greeted with more evidence of why this Government is a cancer on the people. Ministers of government are living lavishly racking up cellphone bills in the millions. What a brutish, callous, and unconscionable bunch!

Doubtless, the 11 ministers and their juniors [that we have bill information for thus far] are far too important to send email, use Skype, and others tools that can make the burden on us, the pauperised taxpayers, a little easier. No, Sir! Their importance dictates that they must be constantly seen and heard on the phone roaming away while in such places as China, Singapore and Timbuktu. This, of course, is part of the ‘con game’ to give people the impression that they are about the people’s business. What a cruel joke!

We who were born and grew up in the deep rural parts of Jamaica have an adage: “Show mi yuh company and mi tell yuh who you are.” Given the revelations last week that 11 ministers of Government and their juniors have ratcheted up cellphone bills of just over $5 million in a year, I think we country folks need to revise that rustic gem to say: “Show mi yuh cellphone bill and mi tell who you are.”

The kind of cellphone device one has nowadays and how much one can afford to spend on same seem to be of premium importance. For private persons who spend their own resources on such transient devices I have little challenge; since they

might, sooner hopefully than later, discover something

the manufacturing/business strategists call planned obsolescence or built-in obsolescence. But for government ministers — employees of the taxpayers — to carelessly squander public resources while the majority of us do not know for sure where our next meal is coming from, where we will get another month’s rent, where we will find the lunch money to send our child/children to school for another week, where bus fare will come from for the next fortnight, where money will come from to buy medication for the complications of diabetes, hypertension, and CHIKV, it is a different

kettle of fish.

Government in this country is fast becoming an enemy of the people. If these ministers were rendering measurable and decipherable value to the majority of the Jamaican people their mobile phone expenditures would be excusable, But our reality is the reverse. In the last Sunday Observer we learned that there is no functioning fire extinguisher at the nursery of the Victoria Jubilee Hospital. The story went on to report, among other things:

“The matter arose after a fire broke out at the facility last Thursday night, leaving one nurse with a fractured wrist, and other workers having to be treated at the Accident and Emergency Department of the adjoining Kingston Public Hospital.

The nurse fractured her wrist in a bold bid, along with other staff members, to save over 20 babies who were being treated at the nursery, following the fire caused by an air-conditioning unit which exploded.

“There is no fire extinguisher here just in case a fire breaks out. So if a fire starts, unless we move fast by using some skilful measures, we could be in trouble,” one maintenance worker told the Sunday Observer yesterday.”

Those ‘skilful measures’ relate to the quick-thinking, fast-acting push by maintenance staff, headed by one popularly called ‘Carlos’ who kept the blaze in check and took the babies to safety.”

Why is this happening at Jubilee? The answer is simple. Poor Jamaican women have their babies there. The phone bills of Arnaldo Brown and Phillip Paulwell could buy some fire extinguishers for the nursery. But, do they care? Of course they don’t. If they did, they would have — as part of the Cabinet — done something about the working conditions of the heroic staff and poor pregnant and lactating mothers. They don’t give a damn! What they care about is what Ronald Thwaites, now minister of education, described some years ago as “the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since slavery”. He was then speaking of P J Patterson’s economic policies. That process has not ceased or slowed; it has increased, and we see the evidence of this all around Jamaica daily.

While some government ministers spend like they are princes or relatives of the Saudi Arabian Royal family, prisoners, we are told by this newspaper, at the General Penitentiary which was built for 800 but now houses 1,659, are living in squalor. To most of us who see and feel the reality of Jamaica, the Sunday Observer story last week was no surprise. More than 50 years after Independence, men incarcerated have to pass their bodily waste in bottles and ‘scandal bags’ since there are limited bathroom facilities — a basic amenity in any decent, self-respecting country. The results of

these Middle Passage-like conditions at GP and other prisons and jails throughout the island are and will result, most likely, in a predictable consequence: more hardened criminals whose ‘skills’ will be sharpened and ready to increase the production rate of our local crime factories that never take a holiday or sleep.

Of course, these realities are of secondary importance

to this moribund Administration, since the International Monetary Fund massages its bloated ego with platitudes of the “miracles” the Government is said to be performing. Miracles for the IMF, yes, since they are getting back their money. Like any banker, that is all they care about — and we can’t blame them for same. Thousands without hope are out of work, garbage is not being collected on a timely basis, especially in what are believed to be ‘nowhererian’ communities, health services are on life support, police services are buckling, and the social fabric of our island is being ripped to shreds. Miracle indeed!

Jamaica needs a solution to the No Growth, No Hope Economics of this Administration. The prime minister’s assurances that she is working, working, working on our behalf are nothing more than fool’s gold. After almost three years of this Government I am more than convinced, like thousands of Jamaicans who said as much in the recent Bill Johnson polls, that the country is heading in the wrong direction. This Administration promised much — one reason for its landslide victory at the polls three years ago — but has delivered very little. We have seen failure after failure in governance. The vast majority of Jamaicans are worse off than they were three years ago. If, as citizens, we cannot see the hope of our toil ensuring that our children will have a better future than ourselves, then something is radically wrong.

Government by the least able, such as we have now, produces one result: mass failure. It is not the number of PhDs, law degrees and Rhodes scholars that decide competent governance. It is the adherence to systems and laws that buttress the best democratic practices, manned by ordinary men, lettered

or unlettered, of good conscience, devoid of kleptomaniac tendencies, status depravity, men with an inbuilt sense of fairness and justice, who believe in the principles of trust and reciprocal treatment of all citizens irrespective of their upbringing, personal wealth or beliefs.

For those who say, “Well, I don’t ‘business with politics,” you are on a road to nowhere in your own mind, because politics ‘business’ with you. Jamaica’s economy is creaking. If we who are suffering most do not, as Bob Marley says, ‘get up and stand up for our rights’ and the protection of our freedoms, in a few years — based on our present trajectory of underdevelopment — life in this country will become increasingly “nasty, brutish and short,” to borrow words from Thomas Hobbes. All Jamaicans deserve good governance. What we have now is a pretence at government.

We have it within us to do much better and be much better. This steady creep down the ladder of almost certain failure is ‘un-Jamaican’.

The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy. — Woodrow Wilson

Garfield Higgins in an educator and journalist. Comments to higgins160@yahoo.com