GOJ budgeting and participatory democracy

By Aubyn Hill, Financial Gleaner Columnist

On Thursday, May 16, while travelling back from the country, I listened with enjoyment on Nationwide radio to the participants in a forum put on by the Jamaica Civil Society Coalition (JCSC) to launch its brochure on participatory budgeting.

I found the discussion by all the participants to be really engaging and I counted it on a plane of high political enlightenment.

Carol Narcisse's outline of the JCSC's objectives was clear and her reasons for limiting the JCSC's engagement to the ministries of justice, national security and education were reasoned and sensible.

Taking on the whole government budgeting apparatus as a starting project would have been overwhelming.

Minister of Justice Senator Mark Golding was the guest speaker at the launch, and the JCSC chose well in that Minister Golding's speech was short, erudite, frank but without even a touch of rancor.

He displayed great intellectual skill in raising so many important issues of governance so graciously in such a short presentation.

Narcisse and her non-governmental organisation (NGO) is forging a new path and trodding on new public governance and political ground in their focus on and push for "participatory budgeting" - and, in effect, participatory democracy.

This is grass-roots democracy at work. It is not to everyone's taste. Minister Golding put it this way quite early in his speech:

"Furthermore, our constitutional arrangements do not recognise a role for such persons in the governance of the country.

And our powerful and entrenched bureaucracy, staffed by public servants who have learned to hold on tenaciously to legalistic formalisms (this is plain legalise which means that bureaucrats will always seek to hold on to their power), naturally regard such outsiders with scepticism and suspicion.

In this context, it should come as no surprise that the concept of participatory budgeting has not yet gotten off the ground in Jamaica."

Given the constraints and "tight parameters of the Extended Fund Facility with the IMF", the minister expressed a dignified moan that his meager budget of J$4 billion or one per cent of the budget pie for 2013 is really under the substantial determination of the Ministry of Finance (MOF).

It may take the JCSC sometime to get to the MOF, but that has to be one of its future objectives.

AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

The position of the JCSC has some philosophical resemblance to the Age of Enlightenment thinking which became prominent in the 18th century. Leading French thinkers such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rosseau - his personal life and the way he treated women and his children some considered to be deplorable - and English ones, including Sir Isaac Newton, David Hume and the American president, Thomas Jefferson, subscribed to this thinking.

Thomas Paines' The Rights of Man had its roots in this philosophy. Paine and the others stood in stark contradistinction to the thinking of the Irishman who lived at the same time and is considered to be the father of modern conservatism - Edmund Burke (1729-1797).

Burke was a conservative thinker but he was a keen and sharp-eyed pragmatist.

While the JCSC's participatory budgeting is rooted in a broader belief in participatory democracy and thus would have the support of the enlightenment thinker, Burke would put a wide distance between his and the JCSC's approach.

Interestingly, Senator Golding's position at the launch was much closer to Edmund Burke's.

"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion," Burke wrote.

It is a tenet of Burkean philosophy that the MP is elected by his constituents to exercise his, the MP's, judgement in governance matters in Parliament. Constituents were encouraged to choose their representatives wisely and at this time only the educated (some) and landed gentry (mainly) could exercise the vote.

In his opening statement at the launch, Minister Golding said: "When asked about a concept such as participatory budgeting, leaders in Jamaica who have embraced the burdens of electoral politics may wonder on what basis other persons should be afforded this opportunity to participate in the nation's governance."

I understand the present leader and his senior colleagues of Edward Seaga's Jamaica Labour Party were quite strident in the questioning of the JCSC's role in seeking to participate in opening up the national budgeting process to greater people participation - taxpayers and funders of the Government.

Giving up or sharing 'power' is not easy. Nelson Mandela is truly unique.

Minister Golding made it clear that elected leaders eschewed "a constant barrage of criticism and cynicism" from many NGO persons - and some of those criticisms, including the recent JCSC's scorecard on government promises were not balanced or well informed.

Senator Golding voiced the scepticism of many political leaders concerning NGOs. "After all, such persons merely have a heightened interest in public affairs, but do not have the legitimacy of having put themselves forward and been chosen to represent the electorate in governing the country."

Indeed, many of these eager people have formed themselves into NGOs which are substantially funded by foreign governments with their own national agendas, which brings to mind the well-known adage - 'He who pays the piper call the tune'. Funnily enough, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been using some of that line regularly.

Minority rule

I lived in three of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states for 21 years. These states have small national population and lots of money from oil - the only instances where socialism works.

There is an unwritten contract that the ruling families rule - al Saud in Saudia Arabia and the Al Sabah's in Kuwait, for instance - and they use the vast oil wealth to look after their citizens.

This has worked well and becomes tenuous only when oil prices fall precipitously and stay low.

Democratic participation was exchanged for social well-being and very liberal state-funded financial support, until the recent emergence of social media. Kuwaitis women are demonstrating for the vote and there are other unreported demonstrations and dissent elsewhere in the GCC.

Governments in poor countries cannot afford such a contract. Social media has fuelled regime change among North African Arabs from Tunisia to Egypt.

In an age of instant opinion polls, social media which informs - and sometimes misinforms - the opinion of our youth, a constant demand for greater transparency, more information and more control over decisions which affect the lives of every citizen, and government budgeting does, there will be a growing demand for more participation in our democracy.

Senator Golding called for "a more positive form of national discourse" and was pleased to have met the JCSC's representatives, assisted in great part by his personal friendship with the JCSC's co-chair Horace Levy.

"Freedom means that we discover truth for ourselves. If we relinquish that responsibility, I fear we relinquish freedom as well." Minister Golding would probably not argue with that statement, and the JCSC would probably not disagree - even though the quote is from Chivalry Now, a conservative Burkean publication.

Aubyn Hill is the CEO of Corporate Strategies Limited and was an international banker for more than 25 years. Email: writerhill@gmail.com Twitter: @HillAubyn Facebook: facebook.com/ Corporate.Strategies