Milton Samuda, president of the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce, says standards have fallen in Jamaica because of a lack of leadership at various levels in the private and public sectors.

"Any objective examination of the past several years and even now will reveal that many of our leaders, elected and otherwise, cannot even pass the exceptionally low standards which we have set for them and, by extension, for ourselves," Samuda said Sunday night during the University College of the Caribbean's inaugural awards banquet.

He added: "Too many of us speak about integrity but facilitate corruption; speak about efficiency but institutionalise bureaucracy; pay lip service to morality and decency, but constantly redefine those to accommodate our own personal short-comings and then elevate the immoral, the indecent, the crass and the banal in the name of a robust culture!"

Low standards

Samuda said Jamaica could not be internationally competitive without standards of excellence, adding that these standards should be adhered to.

Standards, he said, should be evenly applied.

"We cannot on the one hand castigate the Jamaican worker for low productivity and bad attitude, while turning a blind eye to incompetent and unaccountable manage-ment. We cannot demand 80 per cent of the pay of anyone without taking 80 per cent of their conditions of service," he told the gathering at the Hilton Kingston hotel in New Kingston.