In Prime Minister Golding's drips and dabs outlining what an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) might look like, the most palatable disclosure so far is the probability that the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) will have to be slashed.

We expect that there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth at Gordon House, that gathering place for members of parliament where the inclination will be for politicians to draw the ramparts in protection of the trough. For, notoriously, politicians, in and out of government, love to wallow in pork, revelling in its grease and fat as they dole it out to constituents, they hope, in exchange for votes.

Indeed, trading in political pork and having the time of their lives as they slosh around in its trough is one of the few areas of political philosophy in Jamaica in which there is clear cross-party consensus, evidenced again by the broad concern expressed in Parliament this week that the cherished fund could be under threat. There were echoes of the time, earlier in the decade, when the former finance minister, Dr Omar Davies, faced a bipartisan rebellion for daring to propose a cut in the CDF's predecessor scheme, the Social and Economic Support Programme (SESP).

Of course, we will again be 'advised' that the CDF is not your usual political pork barrel and lectured about the hurdles that an MP has to scale before some project, he or she has promoted, will be financed. The member no longer has direct sway over the allocation of cash, the argument goes.

This dressed-up version of the process may require some 'consultation' and, presumably, enhanced accountability. But the new administrative byways do not fundamentally change the nature of the CDF from the SESP. It remains a scheme that perpetuates the concept of politicians as distributors of benefits and to whom their constituents ought to be beholden.

At the bottom line, the $40 million allocated to each constituency - for a total of $2.4 billion in the current budget - is still the MPs' fund, about which he speaks in the first person - as though it is he, not taxpayers, who owns the hog.

Political clientelism

Indeed, the CDF, like the SESP, in concept, embraces an approach to governance that reinforces political clientelism and notions of politicians as benevolent distributors of state resources. That construct diminishes the importance of an efficient state apparatus in favour of a politicised bureaucracy with little differentiation between party and government, if not the ascendancy of the former.

It is unfortunate that it is IMF strictures which might force Mr Golding and the administration to good sense about the CDF/SESP, if not abandonment of their love for political pork. Mr Golding, hopefully, will find the will to go all the way and break the addiction.

The $2.4 billion that was allocated for schemes inspired by MPs should be returned to the Consolidated Fund to be managed not by some special unit but by the central bureaucracy. Let MPs make adequate representation on behalf of their constituents rather than maintaining a system of parallel and competing management.

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