PROCUREMENT PROCEDURES are paralysing public sector performance. His majesty, the contractor general has just moved the number of bids required for government contracts from three to five for as little as $275,000, that's money in the region of the monthly salary of a civil servant earning $3.3 million per year. Really now!

The procurement bible, the Government of Jamaica Hand-book of Public Sector Procure-ment Procedures, in its most recent incarnation, November 2008, is 228 pages long. The procedures require specialists and staff earmarked purely for the task, and, in a government struggling to contain the public sector wage bill, entire procurement departments have sprung up in every little state patty shop.

So onerous are the procedures and so stifling of getting anything done that the political administration has been seeking all kinds of exemptions in order to get some things done in sensible time frames.

Massively corrupt

Now, the goal is perfectly laudable: Jamaica is a very corrupt place. So say all of them who have looked at the matter. Citizens themselves are now reporting in polls for the first time that corruption is the second biggest problem the country faces, coming in only behind crime. We have perfected the art of tribal distribution of scarce benefits which has fed into problem number one, the crime. Some individuals have grown fat, rich and powerful off favoured Government contracts.

So, the Government has created a massive anti-corruption system and is progressively seeking to plug every hole known to humankind. We have the National Contracts Commission, a beefed-up Office of the Contractor General now directed by the aggressively efficient Mr Christie, who still finds the time to write long polemics against those who disagree with him. There is the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, always chaired by the Opposition spokesperson on finance. It is so comical to observe Dr Omar Davies stirring through the mess that his administration created and left behind. There is the auditor general. And Cabinet must approve contracts above a certain size. Apart from the constitutional dangers of the executive messing around with supply contracts to the independent public service, where does it get the time? And why are these ministers, all belonging to one political party, so pure and so wise?

Inefficient country

While the country is massively corrupt, on the other hand, Jamaica is also massively inefficient, if the statements by experts about productivity stagnation and decline are to be trusted. The profit-driven private sector, which really must produce or perish, has long understood that absorbing a reasonable level of leakage is a practical requirement for getting on. There is no private sector, profit-driven organisation on Earth that could survive, much less prosper, under the procurement rules of the Government of Jamaica (GOJ). We are moving towards the perfect corruption of the cemetery where bodies lie permanently still - and rot.

Let us sample the impressive procurement handbook before looking at a case study of some impact. "This manual is applicable to all Government of Jamaica procurement of goods, works and services", its scope statement says right at the start. And "The statements and procedures contained in this handbook reflect the basic intentions and goals of GOJ's policy on public sector procurement. They represent the permanent foundation upon which GOJ operates and are expected to be relatively independent of changing technologies."

Unnecessary exemptions

But immediately there are 13 exemptions, with a general 14th allowing covering "any other exceptions as instructed, from time to time, through the Ministry of Finance circulars."

The people who run serious businesses know that anything so perforated with exemptions isn't worth the paper it is written on. And the drafters well know that the Government would grind to a halt without these many exemptions which, in fact, permit critical things to happen in reasonable time without undue encumbrances. Furthermore, exemptions provide their own stimulus for corrupt practices and the more of them there are the greater the opportunities. Ask Danville Walker at Customs.

Special conditions follow for commercial entities, business entities that Government could well do without being involved with in the first place. No prize for guessing what these entities are - Air Jamaica, the loss-maker; Petrojam, the Port Authority of Jamaica, and the Jamaica Tourist Board. Again the drafters very well know that if these entities were subject to the expansive - and expanding - rules of procurement the country would crash.

Education under wraps

The procurement regulations cover every conceivable purchase of goods and services by every entity in the government sector with little regard for, or understanding of, differences in modes of operations. Take educational institutions, and for our purposes, specifically the public national university, the University of Technology (UTech). In the great and long tradition of the British public university, UTech is an autonomous charter university lawfully governed by its council although supported by public money. "The minister (of education) may, on the recommendation of the council, give to the university such directions of a general character as to the policy to be followed by the university in the performance of its functions as appear to the minister to be necessary in the public interest and the university shall give effect thereto (Section 6 (1) of The University of Technology, Jamaica Act, 1999).

But UTech is not free to even do what every half-pint autonomous university can do. Invite a desired professor to teach there without it being a matter of public tender, that is, open advertisement. And this because it is a publicly funded entity. In reality, direct subvention from the Government now stands at only 38.6 per cent of operational revenue, well below a majority position. The university finds that in seeking to build its self-sufficiency even further by entrepreneurial activity, the government is now indicating that income earned by 'state agencies' belongs to the state. A no-win loop, if ever there were one! Where speed and efficiency matters, as in entrepreneurial matters, the university is hobbled by more procurement rules than the loss-making Air Jamaica enjoying its exemptions.

It is not hard to be sympathetic to the anti-corruption goals of the expanding procurement procedures. But at what stage will the handicapping effects turn public administration into a perfect cemetery?

Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Feedback may be sent to medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.