Martin Henry PRIME MINISTER P.J. Patterson began his current long run in Government as Minister of Development, Planning and Production (MDPP). Remember?
I, of course, have many personal reasons to remember, having worked with and out of (but not for) that Ministry. In those distant days hopes were high and expectations were running riot. A dream team was assembled in the MDPP firing out of the National Development Bank Building on Oxford Road as headquarters.
The buzz instruments for development were in there. The National Adviser on Science and Technology worked out of Patterson's super-Ministry. Dr. Arnoldo Ventura has doggedly survived in the work until today as perhaps the only development adviser from those halcyon days. Dr. Ted Aldridge was National Adviser on Environment. Ted became a murder statistic in 1994 and a towering index (he was a physically big man) of why development has proven so elusive for Jamaica.
Dr. Omar Davies, fresh from a university post in economics, was running the Planning Institute of Jamaica and was a key economic adviser. The MDPP quickly set about producing the mother of all Five-Year Development Plans for 1990-1995. If I remember correctly, 35 tasks forces of experts were assembled to map the way forward. Wide public consultations were held in what, over the years, would become the Patterson trademark style.
I became involved with the sectoral plans for Science and Technology, Education and Community Development -- a little here, a little there. Lloyd Wright, then a senior NGO man and now in old age reflecting painfully on development opportunities lost, will recall the work packed into that Community Development Plan. Lloyd, now past 70 (you'd never know), is still battling for rural development, community development and national development.
Ventura, a shrewd diplomat in UN circles, bagged a UNDP Science and Technology for Development project for Jamaica as one of only six participating developing countries in the world. I was brought on board to run that project as National Project Co-ordinator working for the UNDP out of the MDPP. The National Commission on Science and Technology grew out of the project with the intention of leading the integration of S&T into development planning and action. By then Mr. Patterson was Prime Minister after that famous return and chose to be chairman of the NCST which was to make its merry way through the world without adequate financing from the Budget.
Omar Davies, as civil servant running the PIOJ, packed a lot of work into the Five-Year Development Plan, 1990 -1995. Later, as Minister without Portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister, he would admit that the Plan had not been followed with any seriousness and had failed to stimulate development. As Finance and Planning Minister (and Member of Parliament for one of the most depressed and depressing patches of Jamaica), going into the recent general election, he could only advise that tough times are ahead.
Many of us standing in the year 1990 and pouring our energies into the process, were of the view that Development, Planning and Production would have made such a pronouncement unnecessary in 2002, a decade and two years later. This nostalgia in memoriam has been triggered by the Prime Minister's creation of a Ministry of Development to be headed by Dr. Paul Robertson, the man who did so much to bring home the bacon after being relieved of Cabinet duties to go and get it.
Is this another reason for our development failures: The supremacy of politics over governance and over economics? If Dr. Paul is such a key man for development what would he be doing out of Cabinet for a year to run an election campaign? And back in, how will development interests for all, play against party political interests? This last question is also for the former MDPP boss and current Prime Minister. Robertson will run Development out of the Cabinet Office, a newspaper report said. I hope that should read out of the Office of the Prime Minister. And that is its correct location, if we must have a specific Ministry of Development. For out of hard experience the question arises: How should Government direct and manage development? The Office of the Prime Minister should be the policy and development centre of a serious Government.
Mr. Patterson has assembled several units there, some of which he chairs directly. The assemblage has never gained traction. It packs no energy, it has no visibility, and it gets little done by way of visible development on the ground. Can anybody name a single big successful national development project, driven out of the OPM and for which the honourable Prime Minister is directly responsible?
Part of the problem is the absence of an Executive Chief of Staff as the United States president has -- an organiser, planner, pusher, cajoler, adviser, untangler, communicator, etc. A couple of people have been assigned that role only too briefly under Mr. Patterson as PM. Omar Davies and Maxine Henry-Wilson as Ministers of State without Portfolio in the OPM didn't stick around very long with the task. Instead, the natural political centre of policy and development has been left largely a hodge-podge in the hands of competing civil servants, largely bereft of political leadership, headed by a famously hands off Prime Minister.
UNCEREMONIOUS DEPARTURE
I have long held that the traditional attachment of Planning to the Ministry of Finance is anti-developmental. Why should the keeper of the threadbag also be the chief determiner of projects for expenditure? In which company is the accounts department the centre of strategic planning?
As every old Minister knows, including the Prime Minister himself as Minister for the OPM, and the new one, Aloun N'Dombet Assamba, will soon learn, Ministers go cap in hand to Heroes' Circle to see what they can get, in competition, from the Budget for their projects. Development, in direct terms, in the new administration is now strung out among three Ministries/Ministers with responsibilities for Planning, "Development," and Community Development. Every other Ministry/Minister has, in fact, development responsibilities in the portfolio area. How to co-ordinate without mashing toes?
Ministries of Development and of Mobilisation and of other super cutting-across-portfolio types have never worked well in Jamaica. The MDPP died with Mr. Patterson's unceremonious departure by resignation. It will be interesting to see how well and how long Dr. Paul runs with Development out of the OPM with odd attachments to the portfolio like the developed bauxite/alumina industry.
We are yet to know clearly what his development functions will be vis a vis the other Ministers with direct development functions, and vis a vis the Prime Minister himself with his collection of OPM units. We are yet to see if P.J. Patterson will assume hands-on responsibility as the leader of policy, planning and development in the Government of which he is the Prime Minister.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant.
