WITHIN the garden of Jamaica’s public assets is a large, sun-lit-haloed and bountiful tree known as the National Housing Trust (NHT) from which our forefathers forbade the Government of Jamaica to eat of its fruit. The only people entitled to eat the fruit of this tree are the contributors to the NHT fund, hard-working Jamaicans.

The NHT Act, in addition to the policy, was crafted to protect the monies held within the forbidden fruit from not only governmental misuse, but political misuse as well.

The potential for misuse for political gains by the minister of housing, who is corporate sole and enjoys autonomous latitude outside of Cabinet, was seriously deliberated by the framers of the NHT Act. And so, in order to mitigate such obstruction, the NHT was intended to be kept under the prime minister’s direct portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister as a safeguard so that the forbidden fruit could not be readily eaten by the Government nor the political party in power.

The double jeopardy encapsulating the Andrew Holness-led Government from 2016 to present is that the minister of housing is the prime minister and the prime minister is the minister of housing, whose individual objectives and responsibilities can differ at any given time.

This is in direct conflict with the tenets used to frame the NHT Act in order to safeguard the forbidden fruit that is the NHT from partisan political agendas and cash spend for annual expenditure incurred by the central government.

HOW THE NHT BEGAN AND THE PARTICIPATION OF THE UNIONS

In 1974 a forthright and determined Minister of Housing Anthony Spaulding instructed his officers, led by Permanent Secretary Clovis McLean and Dr Fitz Ford, to find a way for the workers of Jamaica to afford owning their own homes. With the support of the first-term Prime Minister Michael Manley, the NHT was formed in 1976 by way of an amendment to the National Insurance Act.

Notwithstanding its establishment, the NHT was finalised by Act on the heels of the then second-term Prime Minister Manley who was negotiating an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the terms of which required a wage freeze across both public and private sector workers.

The trade unions’ response to this measure was very hostile and they were on the verge of locking down the country. Manley had to find a way to offer a programme that would be to the benefit of the union movement.

Through his experience and camaraderie with the unions, Manley was able to summon his tenacious Deputy Prime Minister PJ Patterson and all the stakeholders to the Cabinet office at Jamaica House to find a tangible incentive that would cause them to buy into the wage freeze. This historic meeting took place on the Saturday before the agreement was due on the following Monday.

During the meeting Manley took a call from the IMF, leaving Patterson to thrash it out with the ginnygogs: Lascells Beckford of the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, E Lloyd Taylor of Jamaica Association of Local Government Officers (JALGO), Hopeton Caven from the Trades Union Congress (TUC), and Lloyd Goodleigh from the National Workers’ Union, to name a few. They were insistent that the unions must have permanent membership on the NHT board and with the same vigour were against any intermingling of NHT funds with other central government schemes.

By the time Prime Minister Manley rejoined the meeting his deputy prime minister was pleased to report that a deal had been struck with the unions that would cushion, somewhat, the effects of the wage freeze. This manifested as tangible incentives through the existing NHT that would make it more affordable and accessible for the workers of Jamaica to own a house. The terms that emerged from that pivotal meeting were used as the framework for the finalisation of the NHT, which led to the NHT Act being passed in the Houses of Parliament in 1979.

Of note, the ginnygogs were dogmatic about protecting these new incentives from being misused by the Government or misused for partisan political gain, which resulted in them seeking to insulate the NHT from the Ministry of Housing. As a result, the terms of the consensus mandated that the NHT be placed within the Office of the Prime Minister’s portfolio of responsibilities and the board of the NHT was to always have a representative of the unions and a representative from the private sector for added protection from misuse of the fund.

The Government must provide full transparency and accountability for the savings of all contributors to the NHT.

While we can’t say that indulgence in this forbidden fruit is illegal, we can say that any indulgence leading to misuse — whether governmental or political — is both immoral and unethically in opposition to the original intent, which must be preserved within the garden of Jamaica’s public assets.

Jolyan Silvera is a member of the People’s National Party and a former Member of Parliament. He is also chairman of the Founders Group.