HOW ARE WE GOING TO FIX THE PUBLIC SERVICE?

It has been 100 days since the PLP was elected to office on 16 September 2021. That day was filled with the promise of change.  The PLP having learned its lesson that you cannot keep chasing after the anti-black UBP/FNM and seeking to be just a better model of them, was set to launch into a new era where for the first time since Pindling, there was going to be a real focus on the issues which affect ordinary people.

The problem is there is always something in the way.  It is bias in many cases against black and poor people.  It is an ingrained classism which infects all aspects of the society which makes the PLP itself cautious and coy when it comes to govern.  Then there is the public administration. 

It was Michael Manley who said way back in 1980 that one of the issues that they found  in Jamaica was that the public administration simply could not keep up with the amount of change that his administration wanted to accomplish in Jamaica.  The result is  the PNP which he led failed and he lost office.  There were other factors but he named the public administration as a major one.

So let us review what happens in The Bahamas. Routinely a decision to build a school to the time the first shovel is in the ground is three years.  So if a government does not get that decision in within the first few months, they are effectively dead in the water. Try and get a new employee or a promoted employee paid the moneys that they are owed.  That takes an eternity.  Try writing a letter from one government ministry to the next. An employee told the story last week of a letter written on 3 November 2021 but just arrived in his box on 17 December 2021.

These are but small examples and no government within the last  thirty years has been able to solve the problem.

One suggestion is a  bipartisan commission to study the issue and make recommendations on the way forward.

We don’t know what the answer is but if the PLP does not fix this problem amongst others in the course of these early months, in five years, we will face the same fate as Hubert Minnis, consigned to scrap heap of history.