Dawn Ritch, ContributorThere is a great deal of public excitement about the re-entry of Peter Bunting into representational politics for the People's National Party. I'm not so excited. He's a nice young man, I suppose, but making him Finance Minister as everybody hopes would be a complete disaster.
Any reader will know that the one hope I had of the newly elected PNP president and now Prime Minister, was that she would instantly fire Dr. Omar Davies. He is the long-standing and malingering Finance Minister left by her predecessor. Dr. Davies needs not only dismissal, but ought to answer charges on his stewardship of the Jamaican economy.
Madam Prime Minister left the Cabinet unchanged, but for a super ministry for PNP party chairman Bobby Pickersgill. I knew from that moment that there was no point my pretending to be prime minister again. This one was a party president, loyal and pragmatic to the bone.
The chattering classes said she had to keep him because of his credibility with the international money market. That was nonsense. Anybody who is a finance minister borrowing like a fiend will always have credibility with the capital market. It means nothing. And it's certainly not beneficial to Jamaica.
She could have got rid of him on the night of February 25, 2006, when she won the presidency of the PNP. She could have, but there would have been an instant revolt of the PNP parliamentarians. Had she done so after they grudgingly gave her their approval as the parliamentarian who most commanded their support, there would have been a riot at King's House.
Writ in stone
Worse than that, not a soul but Portia Simpson Miller would have turned up to take the oath of office. The myth of Dr. Davies is writ large and they believe in stone. It was held that only he was numerate among the whole Cabinet. It was leadership of the blind, for the blind.
Madam Prime Minister saved her party from implosion. But I still wouldn't put it past any of the sore losers to put a charge of dynamite in the party organisation. They and their supporters. The party president has walked a tightrope ever since her triumph, as graceful as anything else she's done.
But as far as I'm concerned, the general election can't come fast enough. Mrs. Simpson Miller must have the nation's mandate to select her own Cabinet without causing a riot.
This is why the public approval of Peter Bunting's re-entry and that he may be the next finance minister fills me with gloom. Nevertheless, the rest of Jamaica is happy and relieved that they at last see the outline of a future Portia Cabinet.
Bunting, former campaign manager for Dr. Davies, would merely be a further extension of slavery and oppression in Jamaica as finance minister. A readier smile with him perhaps, but nothing else would change, and I want change. It can't be had from someone who believed that the policies and stewardship of the current Finance Minister were any recommendation to become prime minister.
There really can be only one finance minister in the next Cabinet, and that is the Prime Minister herself. I told her that long ago.
It will demonstrate to the country that she thinks the matter is urgent and serious. Edward Seaga's degree isn't in finance, business or economics, and he became a legend as a financial wizard. When he won the 1980 General Election, he held theFinance Ministry and a lot of others and it didn't do him any harm. It didn't do us any either, but his Cabinet ministers were in a constant state of revolt.
International relations
That didn't bother him, and didn't bother us either. But he only got one good term, and another, which the Opposition failed to oppose. Better a rule like that than 17 years of collegiate calm and economic decline.
At least Mrs. Simpson Miller's degree is in international relations. The country has yet to learn in which field Dr. Davies is qualified. Not only must he go, but there must be no replacement.
The danger of Bunting or any other, is that he or she will always want to tell the Prime Minister what to do. This is like an accountant directing the chief executive officer of a company. It gets to be a deleterious habit and decline is faster than ever.
The country's first female Prime Minister should not agree, after winning a general election, to being controlled by anybody, no matter how good looking or charming.
Gov't relations and planning
It must be said, however, that Omar Davies didn't control waste, which he is sworn to do, much less expenditure. He let everybody in the Cabinet do as they liked, including the former Prime Minister, so it should come as no surprise that they want him to continue. On the other hand, Mrs. Simpson Miller was moved from ministry to ministry so frequently that she has a pyrrhic degree in government relations and planning.
In the event that she wins the general election as I expect, she should keep all the ministries she used to have as well. There is no reason under the sun to have so many ministries floating about the place, and all having agencies busily countermanding each other to the confusion, expense, frustration and depression of those who are governed.
I was heartened, therefore, when she announced a raft of things for which she had no money in the recent Budget. She said the Finance Minister would give the details of how money would be provided. When everybody noticedthat he didn't, and the pressure began to build, he found himself to a nice yellow couch in front a television camera and said he'd " ... found some (money to do these things)".
Here is a Finance Minister who has never had a problem finding billions and billions of dollars for every ministry to waste, but can now only find 'some' of the money for Mrs. Simpson Miller's projects. All she wants is about $800 million for the social, educational and environmental projects for the country she's outlined. And Dr. Davies has the nerve to say coyly to camera, he's found "some". For that alone, he should have been fired.'
So it's a good thing I'm not prime minister, because the whole lot of them would be gone by now. And I'd have no party to fight a general election. Having got this far, she cannot intend to continue to be patronised by the likes of Bunting and others in the role of Minister of Finance.
The thing I've noticed about the so-called elite of this country since she took office, is that most of them have no class. Having proved to them that she can read in the first dispensation, she must next prove to them that she can count.
