Dawn Ritch, Contributor
IN A country now notorious for corruption and being the murder capital of the world, one obvious outcome is the appointment of nearly 90 ethics officers throughout the public service.
It is a requirement of face-saving that the highest per capita murder rate in the entire world should be accompanied by at least a fig leaf of ethics in governance.
So, in addition to the 90 appointments, outgoing Prime Minister P. J. Patterson plans to send in dozens more. This will bring the full complement of ethics officers in Government to well over a hundred.
ANOTHER PLATOON
Patterson begins to remind me of a Russian czar, playing with his own personal guard and regiment of soldiers. He drills them three or four times a day, but he still cannot win a war - not the war against crime, the one against poverty, much less the one against corruption.
Now he is fielding another platoon of over 100 people in plumes and tunics with honorific titles, and it still will not make a piece of difference either. All of them are just mute witnesses to his legacy of murder, corruption, profligacy and waste in Jamaica.
I do not know why people keep on accepting the jobs that Patterson offers them.
His administration has been a lame duck from the beginning. He himself has officially been a lame duck for at least the last two years, while everybody waits impatiently for his long-announced departure.
SCIENCE OF AVOIDANCE
By taking jobs like these, the so-called ethics officers are aiding and abetting the corruption in Government.
They are permitting Patterson to pass the buck yet again for what goes on in his administration, if not to committees and commissions, then to new full-time state employees on the bottom rung of the Government ladder.
It seems that Patterson is not only a lawyer, but has several doctorates in the science of avoidance.
What is really sad is that countless Jamaicans are eager to help him do it.
Under the Westminster model, it is the permanent secretary who is responsible to the country for the ethics of a ministry.
That person is the steward. In the state agencies, the heads of departments are responsible for the conduct of their officers, and accountants in all institutions are expected not to cook the books.
Is the ethics officer, therefore, to report to the permanent secretary on herself, or report to the accountant that he has fraudulently converted cheques?
Or are these ethics officers to report to a different government somewhere up in the stratosphere?
As a proposed system of operation, it is pure, unadulterated foolishness. It is an attempt to create a parallel world simply to try to obscure the fact that not only the country has become ungovernable, but the Government itself is quite out of control.
LEAD BY EXAMPLE
The answer to our problems lies not in making a pretence of curbing these awful excesses. The only real answer possible is to lead by example. If a prime minister does not set the tone, all else fails. Worse yet, all else is designed to fail.
You cannot lead a country from below. Only from the top. Nor can you lead from behind. It has to be in front.
None of this has ever bothered Patterson, and this country and the lives of its citizens have been brutalised because of it. We are all serfs and slaves upon his estate too stupid to revolt. As a result, there is no end to the outrage, indignities and poverty heaped upon the island.
Patterson alone knows how many legislative cords of nonsense he has used to tie the island up in knots.
Under his administration, there has been an orgy of new laws passed, each one supposedly better than the next and all that went before. Yet five Jamaicans are murdered every day, and waste and corruption abound in the state.
The simple truth is that Patterson has been wasting his time and ours, and would be more than happy to continue to waste it for as long as he can.
Jamaica ought not to have a legislative climate so hazardous and complicated that a guide is needed, such as an ethics officer.
Then the state becomes so filled with shoals and sand banks like the Kingston Harbour, that only a pilot boat will do. No state apparatus should be that difficult to navigate unless it was specifically designed to confuse, frustrate and encourage corruption.
Wayne Jones, president of the Jamaica Civil Service Association (JCSA), made exactly this point when he took a swipe at the housing development process.
He said there were so many different agencies involved in approving housing developments, it was easier for developers to just pay a bribe than to go through the sometimes costly bureaucracy and posturing.
To that, I need only add that one look at the uncontrolled development taking place all over the city confirms what a high price the country pays for such opacity.
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
Promulgating new laws day after day and adding new posts and employees to the public sector will not cure it. A government needs instead, to make it easy for people to do the right thing.
When Alexander Bustamante was leader of the majority party in this country, he had the police arrest his own minister. No ethics officer told him to do it, no lawyer, nor was he advised by any new piece of legislation promising more than it could deliver. He just did it. He led by example.
It's much too late for Patterson to take a page out of Bustamante's book. But I hope that his successor will do so, even though a comrade and not a labourite.
Certainly a prime minister should never look to pass off his or her responsibilities on the people below.
