Martin Henry
HOORAY FOR Education! The National Housing Trust, which resides now, not in the Ministry of Water and Housing but in the Office of the Prime Minister, is to put up $5 billion "to transform the education system once and for all." The Prime Minister's announcement during his Budget presentation was greeted with deafening applause in the House.
The NHT has recognised "its social responsibility" to assist education, the Prime Minister said, following on the creation of many new housing schemes which have resulted in population shifts with implications for school access.
To make the NHT's very generous gift possible, there has to be an amendment of the law. But by the time the Prime Minister was placing the matter before the Parliament, which in theory makes both laws and budgets, drafting instructions for the legislative change had already been issued. The Most Honourable Prime Minister, not shackled by the law, is in no doubt whatsoever that his wishes will be the command of the Government's parliamentary majority to a man and woman, and probably with a good deal of Opposition support if the Whip does not forbid it for political mileage.
The NHT was established in 1976, round about the same time that 'free education' was sprung upon the nation by Mr. Patterson's predecessor, Michael Manley. The Trust was set up as a statutory body with one single objective: The compulsory collection of 2 per cent of payroll salaries and voluntary contributions from the self-employed to make up a pool of funds for housing, and housing alone. While the NHT has been doing much better in recent years, it has never reasonably satisfied the housing needs of its range of contributors.
After the NHT, the Government moved to establish an Education Tax, another two per cent tax, specifically for education financing. With the same percentage deduction from the same sources, the Education Tax Fund should have had exactly the same inflows as the NHT Fund. Where is the money? The Education Tax got sucked into general expenditure and is unaccounted for. And now the NHT Fund is to be raided to do precisely what the Education Tax was set up to do.
Two powerful forces are at work here, which the Prime Minister, a Queen's Counsel, cannot fail to be aware of. One is the proliferation of statutory bodies, to which every administration adds, several of them with their own independent budget stream and all, in total, having the net effect of weakening the mainstream Civil Service. But they are very useful 'political' devices for fast-tracking policy, delivering specialist services, reporting directly to minister, making rewards easier to deliver, and so on. The National Solid Waste Management Authority is a fantastic case study now hot in the news but which we can't follow any further here today.
The other force at work is the straining of the constitutional provision that "There shall be in and for Jamaica a Consolidated Fund, into which, subject to the provisions of any law for the time being in force in Jamaica, shall be paid all revenues of Jamaica." [Chap. VIII, Sect. 14]. The saving clause has been seriously exploited to create a whole variety of special funds beyond the ken and control of the Standing Finance Committee of Parliament, which is the whole House of Representatives.
The annual Budget exercise has become an exercise in creative acrobatic juggling. So much so that the Most Honourable PM needed to say, "in respect of this $5 billion [of NHT money for education] there is no scope for juggling". The inference is revealing! The juggling is already done to sneak the money out of a dedicated fund.
ADJUSTMENTS
A more unified public service and revenue stream would have fewer troughs and bulges in the system requiring juggling for adjustments, a critical point implied in the PM's less than adequate post-Budget defence. Such a system would also leave the jugglers with considerably less powers and was designed to do exactly that.
But strictly speaking, the NHT money is not even a proper 'tax'. Compulsory though it is, state-managed though it is, the NHT contribution is just that: A contribution which people make towards a specific purpose and from which they can reasonably expect to derive personal benefits under clear, reasonable and consistent rules of play. The fund, in principle, is not essentially different from a pension scheme or a credit union. What Mr. Patterson is proposing is a unilateral change of purpose and rules by the manager who is not the owner. This course of action is not just "robbing Peter to pay Paul"; it constitutes nothing less than a challenge to what the old jurists meant by 'the rule of law'.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
