The people's business - The burden of leadership
Published: Sunday | July 19, 2009
Dr Peter Phillips
Daraine Luton, Senior Staff Reporter
FORMER NATIONAL security minister Dr Peter Phillips said that Jamaica had wasted some of its life as an independent nation and blamed successive governments since 1962 for not doing enough to advance the cause of Jamaicans.
"Despite all the gains that have been made over the years, and while the country is by no means a failed state, it is definitely not a successful state," Phillips said.
"We have not made a success of our hard-won independence," the East Central St Andrew member of Parliament said.
Phillips was speaking in the Sectoral debate inside Gordon House on Wednesday.
Jamaica gained political independence from England in August 1962. The governing Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) has led the country for 20 and a half years of the post-independence years; the Opposition People's National Party (PNP) directed state affairs for 26 and a half years.
Features of the failing state
Wednesday, Phillips cited a recent World Bank report which said that the country's average growth over the past 35 years was 0.8 per cent. He also pointed to high levels of crime, unemployment and poverty, as features of the failing state.
"Let us accept, all of us, that this state of affairs is an indictment of our politics and our collective political leadership over the years. Put simply: wherever the country is now, we collectively have led it, and we are the ones who will have to muster the collective energies to lead us to a better place," Phillips said.
The opposition backbencher told the House that there was no doubt that Jamaica had made positive strides since Independence.
"There is no doubt that gains have been made by the Jamaican people," Phillips said, while pointing to marginalised Jamaicans gaining greater access to land, education and housing. He also pointed to a fledging democracy locally.
The current reality
However, Phillips said that despite all the advancements "we need to take a sober look at the current reality, and our performance".
"Despite all these gains, I think, compared to other countries in the Caribbean, other countries that started out independence at a lower point on the development scale, Jamaica has underperformed," the PNP member said.
daraine.luton@gleanerjm.com
J.C. HUTCHINSON'S "chip in cow" comment may have been laughter gas for parliamentarians last year, but it appears that government is getting ready to mark the beef.
Government has indicated that it will be spending $29 million on a national animal-identification system.
The system is to allow for a computerised database, inclusive of passports and tags, which will be able to trace animals from farm to fork.
Hutchinson, the state minister in the Ministry of agriculture, told Parliament last year that government would put microchips in animals to combat farm theft.
"Di tief dem a get tech, suh wi a guh get hi-techer ... wi going to put chip in dem," Hutchinson told Parliament last year.
Continuous ridicule
But even a year after his presentation, Hutchinson continues to be ridiculed for his suggestion.
"When they thought it through, they came to the conclusion that it could not work," Opposition Spokesman on Agriculture Roger Clarke said in April.
However, Clarke may have to hold his tongue for a while.
GMPBasic, a South African-based company, which is in the business of animal identification and traceability, has said that a move to use the microchip in animals would be expensive, but stated that the use of animal passports was a viable option to combat the theft of livestock.
The company also said that it would be even more expensive to put GPS trackers on animals and monitor their movements via computers.
Beneficial move
Several countries around the world have employed the livestock identification method of accounting for animals.
According to Rachelle Cloete, managing member of GMP Traceability Management Software, the employment of a tag and passport technology in the agricultural sector could be very beneficial to the country.
Cloete told The Sunday Gleaner that the GMPBasic solution had been developed to "accommodate a farmer who owns only one animal, to commercial farmers owning thousands".
Among the GMPBasic solutions is an ear tag, with a unique animal number for manual capturing and management purposes. A record of this unique number is stored at a central database, which could be accessible to law enforcers and the agriculture minister.
Cloete told The Sunday Gleaner that it would cost US$1.8 per animal for every 3.2 million animals for the ear-tag technology. She also said that a microchip option could cost between US$7-$12 per animal.
daraine.luton@gleanerjm.com
