IT is clear to all well-thinking people that in the event of a national catastrophic event such as the Hurricane Melissa tragedy no effort must be spared to bring speedy relief to those who have been badly affected by the disaster.

Hurricane Melissa created a national emergency for the country. Any Government that is interested in the welfare of its people must do everything in its power to attend to people’s needs, especially the most vulnerable.

These are truths that hardly need to be highlighted, yet they have to be stated, for too many of us seem to have lost all sense of what it means and requires to show genuine human compassion in the midst of tragedy. Far too often it becomes a matter of one’s agenda: What is good for me and how I can benefit. Often the larger picture is not seen. But a Government cannot be that myopic and must consider the wide gamut of needs and respond to them appropriately.

We, in Jamaica, are burdened by a further problem, and that is the bureaucratic red tape that continues to strangle us and hinder both economic and human development. Since Independence we have evolved a bureaucratic structure predicated on the assumption of untrustworthiness — that everyone is corrupt and you have to enact systems that can catch those so disposed.

This cultural construct of distrust has served as an impediment to social and economic progress. We see every error as corruption or an attempt at corruption. Thus, we implement systems that hobble government agencies in an effort to cross every T and dot every I. One has no problem with accountability and evolving systems that ensure people live by the rules, regulations, and laws that govern processes, especially of procurement of goods and services, but human need must not be sacrificed on the altar of bureaucratic rigidity.

But what often happens is that in evolving these systems we overreach, and in correcting obvious errors we sully the reputations of good, hard-working people. And the majority of people who work in the civil service are good, hard-working people. They love their country and want to see it prosper. They frequently find themselves trapped in an unforgiving bureaucratic structure and jungle that often pits them against the political directorate, and the chasm between a minister of government and the civil servants working in his or her ministry then widens and deepens, leading to acrimony. The net result is that capital budgets are not fully spent because of procurement and other issues, and we can see elements of this distrust creeping into the Melissa recovery effort.

Enter the kerfuffle that has burst out into the open involving the Minister of Science, Energy, Telecommunications and Transport Daryl Vaz and the Auditor General’s Department (AGD) regarding Starlink satellite connectivity in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane. As I have said in this space before, love him or hate him, Vaz is one of the most tenacious ministers of government, with an admirable work ethic to boot.

It will be very difficult to gainsay the fact that he has not sought to do well in the portfolios he has been assigned in Government. He does so with a confidence and approachability that one does not often see in public servants, many of whom too often have to be looking over their shoulders. Perhaps to denude his achievements or bring him down a notch, he is sometimes unwisely and unashamedly vilified by his detractors. But despite all this, he continues to do his work with the people of Jamaica in his focus.

It is this focus that has caused him to be in the cross hairs of the AGD with respect to Starlink accounts that were assembled after Hurricane Melissa. The AGD argues that it was not within his remit as a minister of government to be involved in the procurement of this technology. But Minister Vaz has responded that he did not do the procurement himself, but as co-chair of the committee working out of the prime minister’s office handling the recovery, he used his expertise to facilitate the process. The procurement was actually done by the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM). Shouldn’t this have been known by the AGD? Now that it is in the public domain, the immediate reaction of many is to cast a negative and disapproving look at the minister for something not deserved, but for which he should, in fact, be applauded.

It was a pragmatic and proactive stance by the minister, in light of a national disaster in which many were and are still hurting. The Starlink connections were a godsend. In Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth, I benefited from this technology in one of the locations on which many people descended. It is this kind of pragmatism that is at the centre of the US$150-million loan to the Jamaica Public Service (JPS). Systems of checks and balance must be implemented and respected, but we must be careful that bureaucratic hurdles do not become the enemy of the good, that in our zeal to be right at all times we do more damage to the public good than should otherwise be the case.

Another matter in which rules and regulations are made the enemy of the good is that of students wearing school jackets in the recent cold front over the island. At a primary school in St Catherine the jackets of several children were confiscated because they were not the school-branded jackets prescribed by the school. The children were left to shiver in the cold.

Obviously, the school authorities thought they were doing the right thing, even though it defied common sense, which would have compelled them to err on the side of compassion for the children given the circumstance. Instead, hard-fisted application of rules was allowed to trump what was a needed relief for the students. Some could have become ill as a result of the abnormally cold temperature they had to endure.

But such is the nature of bureaucracies when they become hegemonic. It must not be believed that bureaucracies are the exclusive preserve of highly complex governmental or corporate structures. They reside in small organisations and groups where systems are devised to regulate order. You would be shocked to see the level of bureaucracy resulting in poor decision-making in these organisations and groups. There is no deviation from rules and laws, and this is often accompanied by a blatant absence of common sense.

When laws are not supported by compassionate action there are those in the organisation who will hold on tenaciously to their positions because this is what validates them and gives them oxygen to breathe. This inevitably leads to narcissism and tyrannical rule.

Dr Raulston Nembhard is a priest, social commentator, and author of the books Finding Peace in the Midst of Life’s Storms; Your Self-esteem Guide to a Better Life; and Beyond Petulance: Republican Politics and the Future of America. He hosts a podcast — Mango Tree Dialogues — on his YouTube channel. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or stead6655@aol.com.

Raulston Nembhard