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Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding says the cost of government is way beyond what the country can afford and has hinted at wide-ranging re-structuring and re-organization of government departments in the next fiscal year – a situation that could lead to job cuts.

In fact the total public sector wage bill this year is twenty-eight percent of the total budget and is only second to debt payments in the amount of money it eats up.

Prime Minister Golding in a late night (September 29, 2009) address to the Jamaican Parliament revealed that the government is to establish a high-powered unit within the Office of the Prime Minister geared towards modernizing the machinery of government and improving efficiency.

The Prime Minister emphasized that government’s ability to pay has exceeded the limit and that the wage bill burden cannot be sustained. He acknowledged that it will be politically unpopular to do so but says his administration will have to trim the size of government which overall employs one hundred and seventeen thousand workers.

The Prime Minister emphasized that some government agencies and departments will have to be merged to achieve greater efficiency and processes simplified thus reducing a stifling bureaucracy.

It’s a politically courageous stance on a problem that has dogged Jamaica over the last two decades. The Golding administration has a razor-thin majority in Parliament and the last time any significant effort was made to trim the island’s burgeoning civil service, it administration was overwhelmingly voted out of office.

Ironically it was a former JLP administration headed by Harvard-trained economist Edward Seaga who in the nineteen eighties had to trim what was generally acknowledged as an inefficient and bloated civil service. His reward was political oblivion.