In what may turn out to be a typ­i­cal case of "cock mout' kill cock," Au­d­ley Shaw made the fol­low­ing state­ment in Feb­ru­ary 2002, "...It has to do with the typ­i­cal loose man­age­ment that the Gov­ern­ment has in place." That of course was said af­ter the then PNP Gov­ern­ment was rocked with scan­dals of huge over­runs in the Op­er­a­tion Pride/NHDC projects. In the present in­stance, the new Prime Min­is­ter has act­ed in a de­ci­sive, no-non­sense man­ner to arrange the sep­a­ra­tion of Mike Hen­ry from the Trans­port and Works Min­istry.

Look­ing back at 2002 when then PNP gen­er­al sec­re­tary Max­ine Hen­ry-Wil­son said, part­ly truth­ful­ly and much too ar­ro­gant­ly, "In terms of the elec­torate, the av­er­age per­son does not even know about these things," nine years lat­er Prime Min­is­ter An­drew Hol­ness needs to ad­dress im­me­di­ate­ly the is­sues con­fronting this run­away JDIP scan­dal if his par­ty doesn't want to make it ap­pear that it is the same old, stink­ing pile, but with a dif­fer­ent set of flies feed­ing on it. Now, the "av­er­age per­son," mean­ing some­one at street lev­el who is hurt­ing be­cause of un­em­ploy­ment, un­der­em­ploy­ment or even worse, hope­less­ness, be­cause his or her life is just an aim­less ex­er­cise to­wards noth­ing­ness, may not care too much about gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion. But what is seen by them over a long pe­ri­od of time is that suc­ces­sive gov­ern­ments use pow­er to rape the pub­lic purse while the play­ers in­volved be­come filthy rich.

If there is some per­verse, re­deem­ing val­ue about the JDIP scan­dal rock­ing the JLP ad­min­is­tra­tion, it is that cor­rup­tion was par for the course in the last PNP ad­min­is­tra­tion. From the zinc scan­dal in 1989, the fur­ni­ture and the Shell waiv­er scan­dals in 1991 down to the al­most year­ly ones through­out the life of the PNP ad­min­is­tra­tion. What, how­ev­er, is re­al­ly sad is that the years have not taught some JLP politi­cians any­thing, apart from see­ing po­lit­i­cal pow­er as a chance to get their sweaty, ea­ger hands on the pub­lic purse. Many peo­ple crit­i­cised Ed­die Sea­ga dur­ing the years (1980 to 1989) when he was prime min­is­ter. Most of the crit­i­cisms cen­tered on his in­sis­tence in get­ting in­volved in the de­tails of every min­istry un­der his con­trol.

He ob­vi­ous­ly knew some­thing we did not know-that it could not be left up to "trust" that "re­spon­si­ble" min­is­ters would car­ry out their du­ties with pro­bity and ac­count­abil­i­ty. Trou­bling ques­tions face us. What was Gold­ing do­ing all that time when there was that "war chest" of US$400 mil­lion sit­ting in the Min­istry of Trans­port and Works? Was he fid­dling his thumbs, or in two or three minds about the Dudus ex­tra­di­tion? Did his past not in­form him about key min­istries like Hous­ing and the pen­chant for cor­rup­tion? Did he not know of the Works Min­istry and its sim­i­lar at­trac­tion to that mal­a­dy? Come to think of it, maybe Gold­ing could have learnt some­thing about no-non­sense, lev­el-head­ed de­ci­sive­ness from the young An­drew Hol­ness.

Is Paulwell play­ing games with Chi­na Har­bour?

It is of course the po­lit­i­cal sil­ly sea­son where in­cum­bent ad­min­is­tra­tions are to be blamed for every­thing gone wrong and Op­po­si­tion par­ties have sud­den­ly gone lily white and pure, plus hav­ing all the right an­swers which some­how elud­ed them while they were in gov­ern­ment. Last week, Op­po­si­tion PNP MP for East Kingston and Port Roy­al Phillip Paulwell warned that trou­ble was brew­ing over the im­bal­ance in the num­ber of Chi­nese work­ers com­pared to Ja­maicans on the Pal­isa­does Shore­line and Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion Project. He went on to claim that he had pic­tures to show Chi­nese work­ers do­ing man­u­al labour jobs. The im­pli­ca­tion in his out­burst is that the project tak­ing place in his con­stituen­cy is some­how tak­ing away jobs from his con­stituents.

Is it re­al­ly so, or was it just the usu­al rant from a politi­cian on the hunt for some­thing more than just an elec­toral win for his par­ty? Here is a part of Chi­na Har­bour's re­sponse. "There have been re­cent re­ports in the me­dia about the em­ploy­ment of Chi­nese work­ers on the Pal­isa­does Shore­line Project be­ing un­der­tak­en by Chi­na Har­bour En­gi­neer­ing Ltd. The com­pa­ny would like to state cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly that it does not have any Chi­nese labour­ers do­ing man­u­al labour on any of its projects in Ja­maica. As a mat­ter of fact, the com­pa­ny has not been au­tho­rised to em­ploy any Chi­nese work­ers in that ca­pac­i­ty..." Mr Yang said. It could be that Mr Paulwell wants to see Chi­na Har­bour em­ploy more of his con­stituents, so if he knows of those who are as skilled as the Chi­nese, he should present his case to the project man­agers in­stead of mak­ing cheap shots which are pure­ly de­signed to stir up po­lit­i­cal emo­tions.

Ja­maica Ob­serv­er