Minister of Finance Audley Shaw greets IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde as Prime Minister Andrew Holness looks on, last week. (Naphtali Junior)

Former Minister Ronald Thwaites, in a Monday article in another newspaper, used the line, picked up in the article’s headline “Now that the boss has spoken”, discuss the IMF’s ongoing call for public sector reform.

In her press release last Sunday, at the conclusion of her visit to Jamaica, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde observed, “An immediate challenge now is to release scarce fiscal resources for growth friendly spending on security, education, health and infrastructure, to create opportunities for all. To achieve this, Jamaica needs to take tough decisions to refocus the public sector’s roles and responsibilities, adjust the size of the government workforce, and rethink the overall pay structure.”

Importantly, in his article, Thwaites called for “a huge change in operating culture if Jamaica is to have a cost-efficient public bureaucracy with enough money left to meaningfully improve needed public services”, and noted, “The scope of public-service reform that Mrs Lagarde is speaking nicely about will involve rethinking of the very notion of a permanent job. In any efficient organisation, a worker holds a position for as long as he or she performs at a highly productive level.”

He even added: “Talk to many ministers of government and they will tell you how difficult it is to advance their projects because of bureaucratic torpor”, and called for the return to the model of a non- partisan civil service, which of course most people believe we had in the decade following our independence.

He envisaged this replacing the now decades old partisan practice of putting in place your own people to get things done, adding, “Isn’t it clear that our unnecessarily divisive political culture has backed us into the stalemate of inefficiency to which the IMF points?”.

The need for real public sector reform should now be clear to everyone.

On my return to Jamaica, I remember attending meetings in 2000 on this issue on behalf of the private sector, and up to now, other than the creation of a few executive agencies, it is difficult to see what public sector reform has really occurred in the past 17 years.

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/business-observer/how-the-imf-can-help-jamaica-part-2_117775