Beverley Anderson-Manley

During the course of last week there were a number of newspaper articles that demonstrated the need to do things differently in Jamaica. Some of the articles including those published in The Sunday Herald had to do with the need to trim the public sector and noted that this wage bill has climbed to $58 billion.

The article stated further that the wage bill is more than the country spends on infrastructure and also more than what it spends on the provision of services administered by the public servants.

One of the many services affected is the health sector. A related story in the news last week has to do with the dismal state of this sector pointing out the impact on the quality of care that the hospitals are able to give when patients cannot pay fees. Hospital equipment is severely lacking across the country, even as the Health Minister reminds us - trauma cases are growing, resulting largely from the high homicide and accident rate. This plunges the sector into deeper crisis.

The debt trap

Also in the news - the ballooning debt burden which has almost reached the trillion-dollar mark which works out at approximately $370,000 per person - as of the end of December, 2006. These factors - the extent of the public sector wage bill, the almost trillion-dollar debt burden and the impact on our social services - mean that we just cannot go on living in the same old way.

While waiting on our leaders - the politicians, the policy makers and the private sector to do something about it - we, the citizens, can begin to take responsibility for our own lives. For example, we can take responsibility for keeping ourselves healthy, thereby putting less stress on the hospitals. This does not necessarily require money. Generations of Jamaicans have grown up healthy while living on meagre means.

In the case of the public sector, how many employees give a fair day's work for a fair day's pay? Countries experiencing economic growth of the kind we need in Jamaica have lean, efficient and effective public sector bodies that are results-oriented.

And then to the trillion-dollar debt. Our expectations tend to be high in Jamaica in a situation where a fairly large percentage of the population refuses to pay taxes and where the burden is placed on the PAYE employees. It would be interesting to see what our economic picture would look like if everybody paid their taxes. Of course, directly related to this is the way that the Government manages and spends the tax dollars. We want more accountability and transparency from our Government and citizens must insist on management practices that result in every dollar being well spent.

In keeping with this, do we dare to imagine a Jamaica where corruption is reduced to a minimum? Clear links have been established between corruption, crime and poverty. It is frightening the extent to which corruption is fast becoming part of the Jamaican way of life, at all levels.

Deep cynicism

All this provides grounds for deep cynicism. As the cynicism deepens we go deeper and deeper into denial and we collude in preventing our country from being all that it can be. In the process many Jamaicans, across the social classes, become 'beggars' - dependent on others to 'eat a food' - as they insist 'nutten naw gwaan fi me'. This is perhaps the dominant conversation in the country.

We are the ones who get to choose whether we want sustainable development. We are the ones who have to reinvent ourselves so that as citizens we take responsibility for ourselves, even as we ensure that systems are put in place to ensure that our Government is accountable to us. These are some of the factors we need to take into account each time we project on to others about situations for which we can take responsibility even while we put pressures on our leaders in Government and elsewhere.