Ashford W. Meikle, Staff Reporter
PERKINS
THE PRESIDENT and chief executive officer (CEO) of PanCaribbean Financial Services (PCFS), Donovan Perkins, says that his advice to the Prime Minister-designate, Portia Simpson Miller, is that Jamaica should scrap the constitutional requirement that the Minister of Finance be an elected Member of Parliament.
"I would like to recommend that this year ... in 2006, we remove from the Constitution of Jamaica the requirement that the Minister of Finance be elected to the House of Parliament," said Perkins as he addressed PanCaribbean's Economic Breakfast Forum at the Terra Nova Hotel yesterday.
According to section 55, subsection 2 of the Jamaican constitution only money bills can originate from the House of Represen-tatives. Ipso facto, the Finance Minister would, therefore, have to be a Member of Parliament.
Perkins justified his suggestion by pointing to the challenges that will face the country for the next decade thus the office of the Minister of Finance and planning should be focused solely on economic growth and development, tax policy, public sector reform, debt policy and debt management, and development of the country's financial markets.
CRITICAL RESOURCE
"Jamaica's circumstances do not allow us the luxury of having a critical resource like the Minister of Finance focused on managing a constituency. The world is changing - the region is changing and Jamaica cannot afford to fall behind."
However, the director general of the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) and one of the presenters at the function, Dr. Wesley Hughes, disagreed with Perkins. Dr. Hughes argued that the Finance Minister must maintain close contact with the public (his constituents), whom his policies directly impact.
At yesterday's function the PCFS CEO emphasised that "Jamaica must adopt a catch-up mode, and when you are behind in a football game, you need your striker up front, full-time, undistracted, getting the job done because we want to win the game."
However, he hastened to add, "This is not a criticism of (Finance Minister) Dr. Davies. Under our constitution he must represent a constituency (and) he has an obligation to the people he was elected to represent."
