JAMAICANS are being nudged again to start actively participating in the governance process, instead of leaving all decisions solely up to the political directorate and State institutions.

The renewed call has come from the Jamaica Accountability Meter Portal (JAMP) and the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), who have pointed to the wealth of resources and tools now available to almost any Jamaican to source information from public entities, and probe information on Government processes and outcomes.

“Nanny, Tacky, Cudjoe…they were trying to make change where the leaders of that system were 9,000 miles away, and when you think about what they were able to do you have to ask yourself, ours [leaders] are just two miles down the road, so what excuse do we have for not moving that needle much further than they did? We complain a lot about what Government is not doing but the citizens can also do the approaching…I think citizens need to reach out,” executive director of JAMP, Jeanette Calder stressed on Thursday at a forum which JAMP hosted at the Liguanea Club in New Kingston, in collaboration with the PSOJ.

Calder is of the view that Jamaica has all the ingredients that it needs for change, including a strong legislative framework, but that citizens are the missing link.

“The system isn’t perfect but do we have enough to move the meter? I say we do. The legislative framework in Jamaica for change is solid. The Access to Information Act that we have had for 22 years, there are six Caribbean countries that do not have the right to do what we are doing here as citizens. It wouldn’t be possible for JAMP to do what it’s doing without the Parliament of Jamaica giving to us, as citizens, a gift that says you have a right as the owners of the information to ask the holders of the information to release it, with few exceptions,” Calder stated.

She pointed out that the Government has played a major part in ensuring that Jamaica is ranked in the top six countries of the world for its level of press freedom. “We have MOCA, we have the Integrity Commission, we have the FID, we have the auditor general – that’s a pretty strong institutional framework. We have actually created additional oversight in our Parliament that many countries don’t have, not something we should take for granted,” she said, pointing to oversight committees such as the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC) and Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

Illustrating the effectiveness of persistence in demanding information and engaging the State, she stressed that in its three years of existence JAMP has moved from having a 40 per cent turnaround in receiving responses from Government to 78 per cent. “What does that tell us? At first there was resistance but if you persist, what we have found is that the public officials have responded. We are encouraged, we push on,” she said.

But Calder argued that even with good policy and strong legislation there are still issues of accountability, urging Jamaicans to use JAMP’s online accountability tools to keep abreast of critical information and hold Government accountable. These include the account-a-meter, the MP, legislative, and procurement trackers, and the national budget tool.

Chair of the PSOJ’s corporate governance committee, Camille Facey, meanwhile, stressed that all Jamaicans must recognise their own responsibility in the governance process. “We can’t just leave it to them. Who is ‘dem’? And why do they have more of a responsibility for Governance than we do? Jamaica has clear governance processes and that is something that is good about this nation that we live in. If we don’t measure and monitor then we have nobody else to blame when things are not going as we would want them to go,” the attorney-at-law emphasised.

JAMP has received $64 million in funding support from the British High Commission. Head of cooperation of the EU delegation to Jamaica Aniceto Rodrigues Ruiz stressed that given their key role, civil society organisations should not be seen solely as watchdog organisations but should also be considered equal partners in public policy-making and implementation.