For years now the taxpayers of Jamaica have had to pay the cost for what amounts to the whim of the Prime Minister an/or government. Everytime there is a shuffling of the cabinet or change of government, they go about reordering the structure of government. Not by moving the ministers around, no, they move everything and every body else around.
Here is a general list of what happens in a reshuffle:
1. Rent new expensive office space.
2. Pay to partition the office space into offices and cubicles.
3. Pay to move staff furniture, computers and other quipment to the new office space.
4. Pay for new servers, cabling and PBX (phone) and internet service.
5. Discard all old stationery and other items that bear the name of the old ministry, to now pay to have them all replaced with the name of the new ministry on them.
In addition to all that money (that the country can ill afford to waste like this), this movement of people and equipment results in lost productivity, not for days or weeks but months. It has been more than seven months now since the General Elections and still the reshuffling has not been settled in terms of staff being able to do their work. Time is money after all and lost time is lost money.
To fix this, (though it will need a reshuffle, but a final one) would be to set the portfolios of each ministry in stone. that is, to group logically, all the various different activities that the government carries out on behalf of the people of the country. Once set, no portfolio will be moved from ministry to ministry, and if there is a cabinet reshuffle then only the Minister and his small retinue of 3-4 people will be moved. And if a new addition to the portfolio is required then associate it logically with the ministry that already has similar or related activities associated with it. Oh and to save even more money in the future, Government should purchase or build structures to house the ministries and stop paying so much money on rent alone, rent they currently have trouble paying.
This ensures that the work of the government continues undisturbed and that within a few days of catching up on his or her new duties they ministers can be back at work doing what is required of them. Of course I am only being miserable, so you can all ignore me.
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