Derick Latibeaudiere is gone. Hardley Lewin is gone. Robert Gregory is gone. Trevor MacMillan is gone. Mark Shields is gone. Don Wehby is gone. The problems remain and the country staggers on under the delusion that appointing 'magicians' to critical responsibilities can replace the need for systems which work.
Bypassing the senior ranks of the Jamaica Constabulary Force, retired army chief Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin was brought in to head the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) as one of the first 'magicians', to be appointed by this Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) government, on the assumption that the military man could fix the police force, one of the most rotten of organisations in the public service. Two months short of two years later Commissioner Lewin has tendered his second and final resignation after the Cabinet, according to the prime minister, had decided that it had lost faith in him as commissioner over the failure of the police to bring down the crime rate, especially the murder rate.
Crime and the murder rate have progressively increased under every commissioner of police since the middle 1960s when the upswing associated with political violence began. Today, up to 80 per cent of the murders committed in this country are linked to politically garrisonised communities. And much of the rest is a spill-over effect into the rest of the country.
Meanwhile, the capacity of the police force to maintain law and order has been severely compromised for a number of reasons ranging from its increasing militarisation as a force to kill gunmen who do not have or have lost political protection, to being starved of necessary resources including manpower, from participation of members in crime and corruption to the loss of public confidence because of the brutality (a brutality not without understandable cause under the circumstances of operation) and corruption of the police.
The contribution of politics to the state of crime and the state of the police is too well-established to be disputed. Just before his unceremonious exit, damaging a proud 36-year military record of distinguished service, Commissioner Lewin had again underscored the politics/crime link as one of the factors defeating the police in the fight against crime. It is hypocrisy beyond belief for political leadership to be losing confidence in its own appointee as a magician commissioner to reduce crime.
As night follows day, nice boy Owen Ellington, or whoever else is appointed as the magical successor of the departed Lewin will go down in ignominious defeat before the crime monster, like other commissioners past, unless certain fundamentals of reorganising policing and breaking the crime/politics nexus are implemented.
public-sector performance
Latibeaudiere
Another early and heralded magician appointed was Don Wehby, plucked out of the private sector to serve as minister of state in the Ministry of Finance via the Senate. By any reasonable empirical measure, against his own targets, such as that published by the Observer on August 14, "Was Don Wehby a success at the Ministry of Finance?"; he has been a miserable failure.
As Lewin found out the hard way, the JCF is not the army and could not be made so merely by his presence at the top, so Don Wehby discovered that the efficiencies and procedures of the profit-oriented private sector are not in the public sector, even in its top units like the Ministry of Finance, and public-sector performance could not be transformed by his good intentions, youthful energy, and personal hard work.
But perhaps the biggest appointment of a magician of all has been the plucking of one of the country's top religious leader out of his service to the Church for the office of governor general. The current government's end would have been well served by anyone else in top Church leadership, to bring moral legitimacy and spiritual guidance to the State under its watch.
It may take a while, but Sir Patrick will learn in due course, from reflection among a mind-numbing multitude of civic and ceremonial appearances, as Sir Kenneth did before him, that King's House is in no position whatsoever to reverse the follies of Jamaica House and Gordon House or the evils of the garrisons and crime factories.
executive positions
What the country needs to achieve the results which everybody talks about and wants are systems, not personalities, and certainly not magicians. And here I fall back on my tattered copy of People and Performance: The Best of Peter Drucker on Management. 'In Managing the Public Service Institution', the celebrated management scholar argued that "better people are not needed for better performance. Service institutions cannot, any more than businesses, depend on superstars to staff their managerial and executive positions. There are far too many institutions to be staffed. If service institutions cannot be run and managed by people of normal - or even fairly low - endowment, if, in other words, we cannot organise the task so that it will be done on a satisfactory level by people who only try hard, it cannot be done at all."
One of the magicians appointed, who is achieving a fair measure of success, is Danville Walker at Customs who had previously made a sterling contribution in cleaning up the electoral system. Danville would be the first to admit that he is just an ordinary guy, and interacting with him confirms it. What distinguishes Walker is that he has embraced the management formula for system performance and is running with it across institutions that he has served: What is our business and what should it be? Set clear objectives, determine priorities and allocate resources, set performance measures, build in performance feedback, run regular audits of objectives and results, and kill objectives and activities which are no longer useful to fulfilling the purpose of the organisation.
High-performance systems are rules bound and personality-insensitive. Jamaican people and their political leaders alike do not like system, order and discipline. We prefer magicians.
Nothing positive can thrive in the harum scarum of 'Bly-land'. It is not only the compensation package of the fired governor of the Bank of Jamaica which should be "repugnant" to the Government. The fact that Customs concessions, which magician Wehby left in place, and which pander to special interests in a land ruled by special interests, are costing the public purse up to 50 per cent of potential customs revenues is repugnant and is frustrating the work of magician Walker.
The crime/politics knot is repugnant and is frustrating the work of the police even when led by a magician who was not afraid, when heading the army, to identify the "Mother of all Garrisons". But the moment the JCF takes seriously its motto as its real mission, 'To protect, to serve, and to assure', it will be reorganised from the bottom up for law and public-order enforcement, crime reduction, and human-rights protection. And in pursuit of that mission some politicians may have to be locked up.
repugnant salary package
I have to share suspicion with former minister of finance Omar 'Run wid it' Davies that there has to be more to the sacking of Latibeaudiere than his repugnant salary package. Wynter, spelt with a 'y', will soon set in at the BOJ. A lower-paid Wynter will be Latibeaudiere, with a different style. Should the central bank precipitously change course (and several financial analysts do not think it was on a wrong course under Latibeaudiere), the monetary and economic system is bound to go into shock.
If Wynter becomes Shaw's lap dog, the independence of the central bank is bound to be compromised. Governments are ever-ready to create money and to jiggle economics for short-term political advantage. Central banks must stop them, if inflation and the stability of the currency are to be controlled.
Political action which debases the currency and pushes up inflation (and there has been plenty of that) is repugnant and is far more costly to the country than Latibeaudiere's fat salary package.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant who may be reached at medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.