Ronald Thwaites | Matters of conscience

The Government’s offer last week to public sector workers of a seven and a half per cent wage increase over four years is a serious injustice. How does the political class dare to put this forward when they have given themselves increases of over 200 per cent? This in a climate where there is almost universal conviction of corruption among high officials and more than 50 per cent food insecurity. Don’t forget that all this comes side-by-side with their frantic and shameless efforts to savage the institutions which protect integrity and defend human rights.

Such a wage settlement is contemptuously requiring the people who hold the society together – teachers, security forces, health workers – to effectively take a severe pay cut. That is because Inflation over the same wage cycle is estimated conservatively at 20 per cent and growth hardly more than two per cent.

This means a minimum 10 per cent reduction in purchasing power on government’s own figures. How in good conscience can anything go so?

POLITICAL LOGIC?

How also in good conscience can a political administration ask for a renewed mandate when the economy is teetering on recession, facing punishing external tariffs and while their employees, pensioners, the minimum wage majority and the rest of us (but certainly not the green light people!) will have to choke on reduced purchasing power?

No wonder the daily visa line in front of the American embassy comprises more and more younger, professionally-aged people. The teacher recruiters seem to have never left.

They are voting early. No wonder the news is dominated by police public relations, dubious education, health and security statistics and endless ribbon-cutting. Are we to believe the mirage of prosperity while we are being suffocated by the reality of a wage cut!

This Government has tried to do several good things. Why would they foul their own record by this wage offer which amounts to a disastrous admission of failed economic policy?

Did they think that last Wednesday we would have such belly full of free KFC chicken that this body-blow to public well-being would go unnoticed?

MESS OF POTAGE

As it was, the chicken riots revealed a lot about ourselves. What about the value system, the work responsibilities, the daily productivity required to survive, among the thousands who, leaving all else, before dawn and through to sunset, jostled each other for hours for what – to further enrich the already rich in exchange for two pieces of fried fowl. Really!

History tells us that enslavers used to offer baubles and bangles to entice gullible people to swap their freedom.

MADNESS OF POWER

Then what rape of conscience caused a minister of this administration, sworn to uphold the constitution, to declare that his party would never “surrender Jamaica to the PNP”? What insufferable arrogance! Hello sir, this nation is not your private property or that of your political tendency. You are not our ruler. You are our servant.

More dangerous too is that there has been neither required withdrawal nor rebuke from the doctor who himself prescribes with a cruel stab to every democratic and constitutional ideal, that there is really no need for an opposition to check and balance official (his) power because that is being handled internally.

TRANSPARENCY

There was more intentional blunting of conscience last week by the parliamentary committee overlooking the law and process of the Integrity Committee. There is real danger to legislators of reports about investigations being conflated into assumptions of guilt which may never be able to be fully dispelled. That was the justifiable motive for the ‘gag’ clause.

Significant as that risk remains, the greater evil of the present is the almost universal sentiment that all politicians are thieves. Correcting that has to be the priority, requiring a balanced modification of the gag and full transparency of assets. It is very disappointing that the Opposition sided with a patently secretive administration in refusing to restore public confidence by disclosure.

POWER TO KILL

We are catching the spiritual AIDS, the blight of conscience from a nearby country whose leader can announce about another nation’s leader that “We’re not ready to kill him yet”. How safe are we? How sure can we be of peaceful transfer of power in the event that we the people decide on a change of chief servants? We saw what nearly happened in the US in 2000, didn’t we – and how it has been parsed, rationalised and justified since then.

There are “mimic men” among us. Tek sleep mark death…

PEP RESULTS

Every improvement in primary education outcomes is to be celebrated. But as we know, but tremble to confront, there is an inexact correlation between Primary Exit outcomes and high school readiness. I plead again for mandatory summer school where learning and behavioural inadequacies are identified, therapy planned and where school culture, rules and parental involvement are emphasised.

Instead of caricaturing success by celebrating that most children got one of their enforced seven choices, realise that there are thousands of parents and children acutely disappointed by school assignments. Tangible steps, real investments between now and September are needed to reassure these people that they are not being consigned to failure.

And please, it is very embarrassing to be told that “reading is to be reintroduced in the early primary school grades”. So you mean reading has not been taught all along? What else is primary school for? Also, what is the point of instruction and testing when the language used is not the spoken and intelligible idiom of the students?

PROMISES

The PNP is promising full literacy at the primary level in their first term, if returned to office. I wonder if they (and we) recognise what radical overhaul of the education apparatus will be required to achieve this. Nonetheless it is a laudable and essential aspiration. We should hold them to this promise upon which so much else depends.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com