Ronald Thwaites | What if ...?

Adam Stewart was quoted recently as saying that the Sandals Group had achieved in nine and a half months a Hurricane Melissa damage restoration and remodelling project which would normally have been expected to take three years.

Obviously, the hotel chain made assessments and enforceable timetables from the day after the breeze stopped blowing. They mobilised, operated as a unit, and tolerated no excuses, because the future of their enterprise depended on it.

Successful businesses, armies, and properly structured societies operate like that. Check how some of the foreign relief organisations functioned after Hurricane Melissa.

Of course, it’s different when government has to execute the restoration of over 600 school plants while rebuilding basic services across half of the nation. But, why does it appear that planning and execution of school repairs began so late that, at Hurricane Melissa’s anniversary, scores of schools will still be scrambling to function? Why do our standards of public performance routinely fall short of our own best practices and priorities?

It is because, in our fractured political system and a turned-off population, no administration can spur the high levels of application, investment and productivity required to have got all schools back up on time.

GROWTH?

You can’t get recovery and growth without effective education and training, no matter how many grandiose speeches you make. Are we still serious about “5 in 4” growth? Who remembers that target anyway? The failed proposers are still in power expounding the same flatulence. Nobody listens anymore.

And, if we want growth to percolate beyond the cabal of finance houses with their balance-sheet bubble of ever-inflatable real estate “values”, what about the day labourers who, according to the esteemed Custos Perrin, are being paid starvation wages of $3,000 in Westmoreland but still expected to produce Sandals-quality production?

BACK TO SCHOOL

Next week, a new educational year will begin. Compare the Sandals example with what has been the dawdling process of repairing hundreds of damaged school plants over the 10 months since Melissa. In both instances money has not been a constraining factor.

The shortage-of-materials argument is wearing thin also. If ever there was a compelling moment for Julian, Fayval and whoever else (our good-good Chinese friends?) to meet and accelerate procurement, this was it. Instead of underpaying workers, incentivise school communities and contractors to perform to schedule and high standards.

Instead of running down truant students who can’t afford to resume school, or see no purpose in returning to class, deploy the army engineers and military trainers to put them to work. Feed and train them on the job.

Snatch a priceless character-building and vocational opportunity out of the crisis of hurricane destruction. Offer them Level One or Two HEART certification if they work well and grasp the last-chance opportunity for them to become literate, numerate, disciplined and certified.

The HEART money is already there. The army is already being paid. Are they busy? So are the teachers, whether the students are present and learning or not. We have a long history of apprenticeship which we have chosen to forget.

PAY FOR PERFORMANCE

Sandals hasn’t forgotten. They earn only if their guests are satisfied. We want to get money whether or not we produce. Check the terms of the public sector wage agreement signed last week. More money but no commitment to more efficiency. Watch the expanding proportion of the wage-to-GDP bill even while, courtesy of our powerful ‘friend’, our fuel bill alone has gone up by close to 50 per cent.

What could be more of a national security crisis right now than the compromised state of a large number of our schools and the waste of irreplaceable time and interest among vulnerable boys.

A SET-UP

Despite having the required resources, we are setting ourselves up for the next cycle of criminal behaviour – no matter how many we kill – and a continuing spiral of low productivity. Where does prosperity figure in that scenario? Check the history of Mississippi until they decided to stop making excuses and confront their problem of underperformance.

So, we use sugary terms about reopening every school but “rotating” students – meaning less teaching and learning time. A big argument is raging about modular mathematics certification instead of finding out and correcting why so many of our children can’t manage five CSEC subjects at one sitting after 11 years of exposure to the subjects.

What if, other than coping with the drought, this successful school year was the objective around which every Jamaican would rally? Can a decent contract with teachers precede September 7? Who do we have to lock in a room to ensure that a Jamaica Teaching Council Bill becomes law by mid-2027? Should school boards be given responsibility and held accountable for the completion of repairs?

Let transport and school feeding be so assured that absenteeism is reduced from 25 per cent to five per cent. Stop the promotion of illiterates now. Announce it before the term begins.

LEADERSHIP

School boards and high-school principals! Take a stand in your community that henceforth no one graduates from your institution without a trade qualification and a certification of literacy and numeracy. That’s when you are successful.

What effort could be of greater significance to national development and growth! Do that and, for the first time at last, the ministry will deserve to be called ‘National Security and Peace’.

UNAFFORDABLE

It is costing a bright inner-city godson of mine a minimum of $130,000 to go back to high school. The auxiliary fee of $45,000 is well worth it when you examine the small money the ministry sends versus the high quality of services offered by the college.

Books run close to $50,000 for Grade 10, so will be afforded one by one as the teacher requires. Shoes, uniforms, school bag and incidentals make up the rest.

His minimum-wage-earning mother says she can get an unsecured loan from a registered shark at 49 per cent interest per annum to cover the cost.

Government, what will you advise her?

“They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on people’s shoulders but they will not lift a finger to move them. All their works are performed to be seen. They widen their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels”. (Matthew 23: 4-5)

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is a former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is retired principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.