Why aren't you pushing for performance-based pay for all government workers, members of Parliament, police officers, nurses, doctors, everybody? Why are teachers being singled out? Is the education system the only one failing?
Why not pay the police based on the number of crimes they solve in a timely and effective manner? How many patients are mistreated at our public hospitals and clinics? Why not pay the nurses and the doctors for their performance, too? How about you, Sir?
Don't you think you should be paid based on your perfor-mance, too? Please try to be less biased and call for a performance-based pay for all public-sector workers.
- Valentina McKenzie
justenkas@gmail.com
Sports as uniter
It is no secret that sports in general and cricket to be specific, in the Caribbean, has a powerful unifying influence on people.
For the last few years, the people of the Caribbean have witnessed some really poor and demoralising performances by the WI players on and off the field. It begs the question: What has caused West Indies cricket to become so hapless?
I suggest that one of the biggest problems right now is with the people who administer the game. They have proven to be clueless about the art of the game and its effect on the people who love cricket.
Here is another problem: the territorial make up of the WI team continues to militate against the kind of gelling experience of a West Indian team of the early days.
I may be taken to task for saying that but I think the time has come to put aside our biases and put aside the current crop of unproductive administrators of WI cricket if we are to turn the proverbial corner in the game.
- Dave A. McFarlane
nerdav@anngel.com
Denham Farm
Christiana
Someone inform Azan, please
The Editor, Sir:
We often lament the lack of a leadership in our country and point a finger at members of government. But I tell you, Omar Azan, head of the Jamaica Manufacturers' Asso-caition, made me cringe recently.
Lack of understanding
Azan's lack of understanding of the basic rules of cause and effect as it relates to monetary and fiscal policy was evident. His scant regard for important systems and institutions was clear. His request, nay, demand, belies the basic principles of economics and the core purposes and functions of the central bank. He does not seem to know the difference between a merchant bank and the central bank.
His attack on the governor of the Bank of Jamaica regarding access to loans at five per cent shows poor judgement and reasoning as he is introducing a line which has nothing to do with the bank's ability to bail out the manufacturing centre. If the governor has access to loans, granted from resources other than those allocated to keep the country afloat, it is that which enables Audley Shaw to negotiate loans for us on the international money market.
Sweat, blood, discipline and a whole lot of thought went into making the net international reserves what it is today. Let's not wipe it out in less than a quarter of the time it took to take it to where it is. If that is interfered with for the wrong purposes, a lot more than the manufacturing sector will be at stake.
I am, etc.,
ROHANE RIGUER
rohanegargantuan@yahoo.co.nz
Ignorance,stupidity, bigotry
The Editor, Sir:
Usually crassness, bigotry and stupidity are qualities to be shunned, or at least hidden. Not so with Ernest Smith, who appears to make even more of a virtue of these qualities than already prevails in Jamaica. Ernest Smith, an attorney and member of parliament, has taken these qualities to stratospheric levels with his hysterical rants about outlawing J-FLAG, depriving gays of gun licences, and claims about homosexuality run amok in the Jamaican police force. Not too long ago, Smith enthusiastically promoted virginity tests for high-school girls as a condition for readmission at the start of a school year.
In democracies that are governed by reason, one could comfortably dismiss Smith's recent ravings as simply nothing more than the harmless fantasies of a lunatic fringe.
Unfit for his cabinet
Not so in Jamaica, given Smith's prominence in a country that is, for the most part, virulently and proudly homophobic. In this respect, Prime Minister Golding himself proclaimed gays to be unfit for inclusion in his cabinet, and his government has seen fit to ban school- books that make references to gay family units. At the behest of Jamaica's religious right, both political parties have allowed themselves to be corralled into abandoning a proposed gender-neutral definition of rape for fear that this would facilitate the decriminalisation of buggery.
It is instructive that neither poli-tical party has denounced Smith in unambiguous terms. The same appears to be true of the legal profession of which Smith is a member.
The democracy called Jamaica remains wedded to a culture that is largely bereft of critical thinking, much less justice for all its citizens. In this context, Smith has not only a public platform, but a cultural licence to exhibit and indeed, to further infect the body politic with his particular strain of ignorance, stupidity and bigotry. For most of Jamaica's citizens, this might warrant little more than a verandah chat; for others, unfortunately, it might mean the difference between life and death.
I am, etc.,
O. HILAIRE SOBERS
ohilaire@yahoo.com