ALL 2.7 million of us 'a yard' and God He knows how many Jamaicans abroad have had our say on the performance of the Government over the past two years in office and the state of the country today. And just in case we don't have a column or talk show or didn't manage to get on air in the chattiest nation on Earth in the week past, the Bill Johnson polls have asked 1,008 fellow residents, carefully selected, to represent all of us in giving their opinion.

This Government has come to office and is governing with one of the weakest levels of popular support in the political history of Jamaica. That the Bruce Golding administration is still standing is just one of its biggest achievements. The Government has survived judicial review of seats, which it holds on a narrow majority, over the dual-citizenship issue, and the prime minister, who has emerged as a statesman of some stature and is governing a chaotic country in the worse economic global economic predicament in 80 years, has remained confident enough not to rush back to the polls, the election polls, that is.

Wrong direction

A fundamentally correct conclusion that does not get enough media play in the youthful exuberance to find fault is that the people are moderately satisfied with the Government they marginally elected two years ago and are in no rush for a change of course. The by-election results with increased margins and the poll results broadly interpreted against polls past clearly indicate this.

So Jamaica is heading in the wrong direction the current polls say the people say, as countless polls past have reported. Curiously, but not without rational explanation, while the most pressing problems which the country is facing now are crime and violence (50 per cent), unemployment (34 per cent) and financial crisis (15 per cent), the most pressing problems of the local neighbourhood are jobs (55 per cent, roads, 20 per cent and water 14 per cent).

There is a massive media factor at work here in how the world is reflected to the people. And as Bill Johnson himself acknowledges, the party loyalty factor colours the polls. So at the level of intellectually sophisticated youth leadership JLP/G2K, Delano Seivright gave the Government an A, on CVM's 'Direct', for what it has managed to accomplish under difficult circumstances, while PNPYO Damion Crawford generously assigned a D rather than F for what the Government has managed to accomplish under acknowledged difficult circumstances!

Empty political promises

A third factor influencing the polls, a factor which is an Achilles heel of every competitive democracy, is political promises made on the campaign trail. Political parties competing for state power make a whole bag of stupid promises. There is nothing uniquely Jamaican about this. It is equally stupid on the part of the people and their mass media to treat these promises with too great a degree of seriousness. Some serious thinkers on the matter have concluded that escalating expectations, built into the very fabric of democracy, will ultimately destroy this very extraordinary system of government, given enough time. In the meantime, it is far better to judge a government by policy pronouncements made once in office.

Two of the stupid policy decisions and actions of the Government, which poor people generally think would be in their favour, are the removal of cost-sharing in secondary education and the abolishing of user fees in the state health-care system. Neither can be afforded. The real cost will be paid, in fact, is being paid, in declining quality.

Timorously silent

The policy and delivery people in public administration certainly, certainly in health have been timorously silent. Like the administrators catching hell from the Government Procurement System which I wrote about last week but who are unwilling to speak up and indeed to rebel. As one respondent said, "You have said what my colleague CEOs have wanted to say for a very long time but have been afraid."

But even as he tries to wiggle out of the procurement maze, the prime minister is proceeding with tying himself into knots through political acrobatics by insisting on a reduction of the public-sector wage bill without job cuts - at least not in this fiscal year.

Another of my pieces dealt with the promised contribution from the increased special consumption tax (SCT) on fuel to the Road Maintenance Fund. It was heartening to hear from the minister of finance speaking at the weekly post-Cabinet briefing a couple of weeks ago that the money is now flowing and the commitment will hold firm. One of the little successes of the administration, which has gone too little appreciated is, in fact, the patchwork already done on a large number of roads - but with soooo many left to be done.

And Audley Shaw, like the cheese, now stands alone at finance, his little elves having left for other ventures. The wolf which the critics have been bawling does not seem in any hurry to arrive. The broad trend lines and patterns of the macroeconomy have been left largely undisturbed in the last two years: The debt, the Budget deficit, the declining value of the currency, the chronically high levels of unemployment, the twisted (not crooked) tax system, which have defined - and defeated - every minister of finance of the last 35 years, only one minister, the longest serving, having being an economist, with little to show for it.

The Observer of Friday, August 14, published a report card on departed helper Don Wehby brought in from the private sector to fix finance. Wehby failed - dramatically - on every item of direct responsibility. The tendency of the Golding government to import magicians has not worked and is not good policy. Another imported magician Col Trevor MacMillan departed national security with less than honourable discharge.

Don Wehby, at his farewell from government luncheon, said the country is fortunate to have Bruce Golding as prime minister at this time of serious economic challenges. Wehby calculatedly went "on record" to say "in all sincerity" that "once we get over this crisis, which we will get over, you will go down in the records as the best prime minister". There were no reports on what the GraceKennedy man was drinking before he spoke. But suffice it to say that views of Golding's competence in the face of adversity, mixed with a sense of quiet relief that he is in charge and not another, are more widely held than we are sometimes led to believe. The prime minister's personal popularity rating remains stubbornly above that of his party and his government.

The United States authorities want Dudus, the Tivoli Gardens strongman, in Prime Minister Golding's garrison constituency of West Kingston, built by Labour. This God-sent extradition case, however it turns, will test the paltry commitment of this Government to detribalise and degarrisonise politics. Dwight Nelson, the career trade unionist, is now in the graveyard of national security. He, like his predecessors of the last 40 years or so, will have his success determined by the reduction in homicides, 80 per cent of which take place in the garrisons.

All in all, I am sticking to my guns. This administration is very far from being any kind of disaster - or any kind of brilliant performer. It chugs along, with bright patches here and there in the midst of the big negative trend lines running for a generation and which make people hunger for really good governance. C+. If Bruce and his many ministers cannot break the cycle of party first, they will never distinguish themselves in any effort to really transform Jamaica. We will see what happens in the next three years.

Martin Henry is a communications consultant who may be reached at medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.