Prime Minister Simpson Miller has fudged when she should have acted with firmness and clarity. In that regard, her administration is assuming the worst attributes of her predecessor's, P.J. Patterson.

Why have a horse when you can get a committee to design an approximation thereof? So it is that she has appointed a Cabinet committee to meet with Errol Ennis, the junior minister for agriculture and lands, to determine whether he wrote a letter to the press, critical of the Financial Services Commission's (FSC) investigation of David Smith's Olint money-trading scheme. And if he wrote the letter, the committee is to determine whether Mr. Ennis still holds his views.

Well, Mr. Ennis, who, incidentally, was previously the junior finance minister, has not denied authorship of the letter, which described the FSC's raid on the Olint office last year as "Gestapo-like, vulgar abuse of state power and highly reflective of the actions of a totalitarian state."

Mr. Ennis is not a member of the Cabinet and perhaps, therefore, does not feel himself bound by the Westminster notion of collective responsibility. Which would be odd, given his role as a senior member of the executive.

Yet there are two fundamental points on which Mr. Ennis has publicly diverged with his Government colleagues, which should cause him to reassess his role in the administration, especially in the face of the Cabinet's endorsement of the actions of the FSC with regard to Olint.

The FSC is concerned that Mr. Smith resisted attempts to bring his organisation under the commission's regulatory authority, arguing that as a members' club Olint need not have been licensed. Olint has moved its operations outside of Jamaica, but the FSC's boss, Brian Wynter, has left little doubt of his view that Mr. Smith's operation is likely to be only short of a Ponzi scheme. At best, the regulators believe, it is a highly speculative operation, which, if it goes, will not only hurt investors but undermine confidence in the Jamaican financial market.

Mr. Ennis disagrees. He sees Olint as a source of substantial reflows, which would be a boon to the Jamaican economy. Or, that was his position in his letter.

But Mr. Ennis goes further, much further in his characterisation of the Jamaican state. He believes its behaviour with regard to Olint to be totalitarian, crunching and jack-booted in enforcing its will. If that is Mr. Ennis' considered view, and given the Cabinet standing by the FSC, it would seem to us that Mr. Ennis' continued occupation of a critical place in the Government is untenable. His own integrity should declare this to himself. Indeed, he could effectively maintain his campaign against the perceived excesses of the state from the parliamentary backbenches. Giving up ministerial privileges should not be too much.

If Mrs. Simpson Miller feels that Mr. Ennis is in fundamental breach of the principle of collective responsiblity, telling him so and booting him from the government should not be difficult. A simple telephone call to Mr. Ennis could ascertain whether he still holds the position he enunciated in his letter.

But the PM prefers to go the route of a committee. She is likely to get her camel.

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