We all know that prime ministers are wedded to the truth but, like other wedded couples, they sometimes live apart. — Hector Hugh Munro

An excerpt from Aesop’s fable The lion, the bear, and the fox

A lion and a bear seized a kid at the same moment and fought fiercely for its possession. When they had fearfully lacerated each other and were faint from the long combat, they lay down exhausted with fatigue. A fox, who had gone round them at a distance several times, saw them both stretched on the ground with the kid lying untouched in the middle. He ran in-between them, and seizing the kid scampered off as fast as he could. The lion and the bear saw him, but not being able to get up, said: “Woe be to us, that we should have fought and belaboured ourselves only to serve the turn of a fox.”

Moral/Interpretation: It sometimes happens that one man has all the toil and another all the profit.

A month and four days ago Dr Peter Phillips, our minister of finance and de facto prime minister, placed supporters of the People’s National Party (PNP) in the ‘stand behind your blocks’ mode at York Town in Clarendon. Last week Sunday he instructed track officials to check the running shoes and spikes of some of the athletes. “Get ready, for you know neither the time nor the hour,” Phillips warned. The biblical allusions used at the meeting were intended to stimulate the production of natural political adrenaline. Artificial stimulants of varying strength stored in well-protected hogsheads are near required fermentation, sources say. We must not lose sight of the fact, however, that it is the deputy who has the starter’s gun. And calypso artiste Penguin told us in that 1982 road march hit, A deputy essential.

The John Chewits, Banana Quits and Black-Bellied Plovers have confirmed two reasons for Phillips having the starter’s pistol. One: The bloodletting inside the PNP has not stopped, in spite of his York Town ‘edict’. Dr Dayton Campbell’s tirade two weeks ago against Minister of Youth and Culture Lisa Hanna is fresh evidence of fractions and factions in the PNP.

Campbell’s lightning, but disguised, apology and public contrition since then suggests that a political gag order has been put on him. Is it that PNP ginnygogs have reminded him that they hold the political handle and he holds the blade? Campbell said last week that from henceforth he will “keep cool”. JLP caretaker Othneil Lawrence has made major inroads into Campbell’s St Ann North Western constituency, according to a recent poll. Paul Burke, general secretary of the PNP, said 10 days ago that 12 MPs could face “run-offs” or challenges. However, more volcanic rumblings are being heard at other levels of the party. Many in the PNP hierarchy dread more political magma. Watch that one. I will say more presently.

Two: Portia Simpson Miller’s handlers are using a tried, tested and proven Machiavellian Principle. Niccolo di Bernardo dei Machiavelli posited in his seminal work The Prince that a political leader should always have a deputy to do the ‘dirty work’. Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, the birds confirm, wants to preserve her ‘sunshine leader’ veneer, albeit more imagined that real. She wants an election vehicle handed to her that is well-oiled and free from any electrical or mechanical troubles. Phillips is the best man to deliver that vehicle. He has currency and credibility earned from his diligent attention to the fiscal side of the economy. He is the unofficial heir apparent.

Additionally, of course, Phillips is chairman of the PNP’s Campaign Committee. Much of Phillips’ actions on the stump are political optics and pyrotechnics. The birds tell me also that many in the inner sanctum of the PNP think he is the best at political possum playing.

Reflect on this instructive message from my ‘fine-feathered friends’ last week and things, thereafter, become less like an enigma with regard to when the ‘gate will be flown’:

“The People’s National Party (PNP) will generously piggyback on the merriment at Christmas and its attendant suspension of reality. January 2016, the birds tweet, will not be a tamarind month, especially for those already ‘genetically connected’. Slinger Francisco, known worldwide as the Mighty Sparrow, undisputed king of calypso, sang, ‘You can’t love without money. You can’t make love pon hungry belly.’ Cupid’s arrows will fly, the birds say, and before Valentine’s Day.” (Sunday Observer, August 16, 2015)

The birds are tweeting that a major hurdle was achieved last week. The Jamaica Teachers’ Association accepted the seven per cent wage offer over two years. My sources say Horace Dalley, minister without portfolio in the Ministry of Finance and Planning with responsibility for the public service, has been instructed to burn the midnight oil to ensure that the police, nurses and doctors sign off on the four per cent in year one and three per cent in year two salary deal before the PNP Conference next month. My sources say also that the teachers will receive their first retroactive payment, one of four tranches, at the end of November and the second in January.

The birds say that if the rains do not come in sufficient quantities to ease the drought, water expenditure in especially marginal seats will be a major conduit of ‘electioneering’. No one will be able to complain since water is life. This year’s Christmas roadwork will be the mother of all such programmes, sources say.

Last December, the birds tweeted, inter alia, that there would be as many as three visits from African leaders/heads of state before the end of 2016. President Obama came in April, and President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro is coming next month. The birds alerted that the PNP would have had, by the middle of 2015, a series of meetings across the island similar to the Live and Direct sessions P J Patterson held across Jamaica after he resigned in the midst of the Shell waiver scandal. Those meetings have been halted primarily because they have failed to gain the political traction that the PNP intended, I am reliably informed. They also sang about a seven per cent wage deal from the Administration. Phillips’ much expanded role in the PNP was also their constant serenade.

Irrespective of certain foibles of some of these creatures, so far their tunes have been billboard hits. I shall tell you more from them soon.

It was Phillips who told Comrades that the Government had done all that it can for poor Jamaicans. “He pointed to increases in the minimum wage in recent years, the decline in inflation, and investments in the Programme of Advancement through Health and Education (PATH).” (The Gleaner, August 17, 2015)

We must judge the value of Phillips’ achievement slate against the answers to one simple question: Are the majority of Jamaicans better off today than three years ago?

Let us start with poverty. More Jamaicans today are living below the poverty line than three years ago. Some 1.1 million Jamaicans live below the poverty line. (The Gleaner, March 26, 2014). Thirty-five per cent of Jamaicans live as squatters (The Gleaner, July 11, 2012)

Since the start of the year nearly 700 Jamaicans have been slaughtered. The level of distrust of the police is at a record high. On average, three citizens have been murdered each day since the start of the year. Our murder rate is in the top five of the world.

Jamaica has a higher income inequality than Haiti and every other country in this hemisphere, except Suriname. (The Gleaner, December 4, 2014).

Three and half years ago, when the PNP took office, the Jamaican dollar was at $86.78 to one US$1. Up to last Tuesday it was $117.48 to US$1. In an import-dependent economy, the mathematics of how that destroys the earning power of the poor and vulnerable is not rocket science. Each one-dollar devaluation of the Jamaican currency means that our debt skyrockets by billions. These billions will be paid back by the disappearing middle class, since those who have friends “inna high society”, as Bob Marley called them –the privileged one per cent — do not pay their fair share of taxes.

Today we have a dollar that is worth less than US$0.01. Out debt today is over $2 trillion. The debt climbs like a vicious snake as our dollar is devalued and the poor get most of stings.

Since the PNP took office there has been a 36 per cent devaluation of our dollar. How has that helped the poor, Dr Phillips? Some 500 workers at Golden Grove Sugar Factory, the last major employer of labour in St Thomas, were made redundant last month. Some 4,500 people will be impacted by the multiplier effect.

Does Phillips know that the price of schoolbooks has increased by an average of six per cent this year? If fewer and fewer poor people can buy textbooks for their children, how are they helped?

In the meantime the Administration is racking up even more expensive debt under the guise that the poor will benefit. Government’s most recent Eurobond deal is a classic example of suicidal economics. Last Sunday, former minister of industry in the P J Patterson Administration, Claude Clarke, gave this insightful analysis.

“At an interest rate of only one per cent pa, the US$3.2-billion PetroCaribe loan is by far the lowest-cost debt on the Government’s $2.1-trillion debt mountain. The cost of servicing it was US$32 million per year in interest payments. The annual interest on the new US$1.5-billion debt created to replace it will be US$103 million.

“What is abundantly clear is that in causing US$1.5 billion of investable funds and US$71 million of increased annual debt-servicing costs to be attracted away from productive activities to finance the Government, the PetroCaribe debt buy-back could turn out to be more of a suppressant than a stimulant to the economy.” (The Gleaner, Sunday, August 16, 2015)

The mathematics is simple. Scores of eminently qualified individuals have been pointing out to the Government that the PetroCaribe is a bad decision. The Government insists it is a “game-changer”. The question is, game-changer for whom? Wall Street bankers and multilateral creditors or the poor that Dr Phillips glibly says his Government has done all it can to help?

Due to a lack of proper planning by successive administrations, a large portion of the country, including its commercial capital Kingston, is now suffering because of a preventable water crisis. The Mona Reservoir was completed in 1947 and the Hermitage Dam — the smaller of the two storage facilities in the Kingston Metropolitan Area (KMA) — in 1927. The population of Kingston and Port Royal, according to the Statistical Institute of Jamaica, was 103,713 in 1943, while St Andrew had 120,067 in 1947. The population is estimated to be just a shade below 770,000 in Kingston and St Andrew now. But, guess what? We still have only the Mona and Hermitage water storage facilities to serve the more than 150 per cent increase in the Corporate Area population. In the last three years this Administration has done no major infrastructural work to take the universal solvent from the water-rich north to the water-poor south. The last major water project in Jamaica aimed at addressing water disequilibrium in the KMA was the Yallahs Pipeline Project in 1983.

Last Tuesday, CVM TV showed footage of demonstrations in St Mary; roads were blocked and lives were dislocated. People, very poor people, are forced to buy “a load a water” for as much as $9,000. Did these people have these challenges on a similar scale three years ago, Dr Phillips?

In St Elizabeth South Eastern, Member of Parliament Richard Parchment has called for the constituency to be declared a ‘disaster zone’ because of the grave water crisis. St. Elizabeth South Western is in a similar predicament, according to JLP caretaker Floyd Green. Hundreds of acres of crops have been destroyed and the impact on quality and price is now being borne by the poor who do not shop for ‘market produce’ in the supermarket but at places like Coronation and Heywood Street markets.

In large parts of what by now is the former breadbasket parish of St Elizabeth, some farmers are forced to buy water for as high as $12,000. There are only eight water trucks to serve the KMA, according to Acting National Water Commission President Mark Barnett. What will happen when schools reopen in two weeks if the rains do not come? Has the Government really done all it can for poor Jamaicans, Dr Phillips?

Local and international experts have told us that Jamaica has enough water for all the needs of its citizens. We have too many political incompetents like Water and Climate Change Minister Robert Pcikersgill who drain the public purse. That is the epicentre of our problems.

This Government is an unconscionable bunch. One of the first things they did upon taking office was spend $60 million on the purchase of high-end vehicles. They then wasted near $200 million on the NHT/Outameni bailout. They spent 350 million to extinguish a preventable fire at Riverton dump and to date over $100 million cannot properly be accounted for at the National Solid Waste Management Authority. They have wasted millions on phantom projects such as the technology park/film lot fiasco at the old Goodyear Factory in St Thomas. They damaged Jamaica’s reputation in scandalous non-starters like the failed 381-megawatt energy project, and the Krauck and Anchor cock-up. And billions are owed by the Administration, especially to small contractors. Many will soon be out of business.

What is worse, not a single minister of government has been made to resign for the billions in lost opportunity, revenue, and damage to Jamaica’s reputation. Has the Administration really done all it can to help the poor, Dr Phillips?

The paradox of education is precisely this; that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. — James Baldwin

Garfield Higgins in an educator and journalist. Send comments to the Observer or higgins160@yahoo.com.