Key sys­temic fail­ures that be­set the coun­try are of­ten over­looked or mis­di­ag­nosed be­cause they are iden­ti­fied with the per­son­al­i­ty of the of­fice­hold­er. Per­haps the most fit­ting ex­am­ple of this is the po­si­tion of the Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty. This min­is­te­r­i­al po­si­tion has been the prover­bial hot seat, a re­volv­ing door that has seen more min­is­ters com­ing and go­ing than any oth­er min­is­te­r­i­al po­si­tion, mak­ing its in­cum­bents ap­pear im­po­tent. The same is true of the of­fice of the Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, be­cause no in­cum­bent has been able to demon­strate re­al progress, the pub­lic of­ten be­comes in­vest­ed in judg­ing the com­pe­tence or in­com­pe­tence of the of­fice­hold­er.

Min­is­ter Hinds, like many min­is­ters, is over­come by the de­mands of this of­fice.

His ut­ter­ances in­di­cate that he is out of his depth, clue­less about what to do or say next. That is as much a fault of his com­mu­ni­ca­tion style as it is of his in­abil­i­ty to iden­ti­fy a prag­mat­ic ap­proach. Re­al­is­ti­cal­ly, no min­is­ter will be able to stem the tide of vi­o­lence and crim­i­nal­i­ty that has over­tak­en the coun­try. We did not get to this point overnight. It can­not be solved by a sin­gle mea­sure and it will take time. What it re­quires is a com­pre­hen­sive ap­proach that is con­sis­tent, per­sis­tent, and mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary.

The prob­lem is not sim­ply man­pow­er, ad­di­tion­al re­sources, or how much more mon­ey is spent. If more po­lice of­fi­cers are hired lead­ing to an in­crease in the num­ber of cas­es solved and there­fore ar­rests, how will the Ju­di­cia­ry han­dle the high­er vol­ume of cas­es it will be re­quired to ad­dress? Then there is the mat­ter of ev­i­dence. It is not suf­fi­cient to find guns and shoot­ers, the guns must be matched to the bul­let and the vic­tim. This means that what­ev­er is caus­ing the back­log in bal­lis­tics test­ing must be rec­ti­fied. It cur­rent­ly takes more than two years for bal­lis­tic re­ports to reach the court, dur­ing which time the ac­cused is out on bail and back on the “job”.

The dif­fi­cul­ties in the ad­min­is­tra­tion of jus­tice are high­light­ed in the cur­rent le­gal im­broglio be­tween the Chief Jus­tice and the for­mer chief mag­is­trate. What is the ef­fec­tive dif­fer­ence be­tween 28 and 53 part-heard mat­ters? What is an ac­cept­able num­ber of part-heard cas­es, and how were they dealt with when oth­er mag­is­trates were pro­mot­ed? Isn’t there a com­put­er sys­tem that tracks and re­ports all the cas­es as­signed to a par­tic­u­lar judge or mag­is­trate? Shouldn’t those re­ports be done pe­ri­od­i­cal­ly and rou­tine­ly to de­ter­mine the case­load or the rel­a­tive ef­fi­cien­cy of each judge or mag­is­trate? How is pro­mo­tion de­ter­mined? What are the met­rics used to de­ter­mine whose judg­ment is bet­ter?

Sim­i­lar­ly, it is in­com­pre­hen­si­ble how any po­lice of­fi­cer could be al­lowed to ac­cu­mu­late hol­i­day en­ti­tle­ments that ac­count for more than a year away from du­ty. How do these ba­sic per­son­nel ad­min­is­tra­tion mat­ters go un­no­ticed?

State­ments by min­is­ters that sug­gest that they do not have the pow­er to make changes sound in­sin­cere to a frus­trat­ed pub­lic. First, it was a fire truck that cost mil­lions to be towed, now it is the wrong lad­ders or no fire en­gines. Politi­cians are vot­ed in­to of­fice to ef­fect pos­i­tive change, leg­isla­tive or ad­min­is­tra­tive, nec­es­sary to cor­rect sys­temic and pro­ce­dur­al de­fi­cien­cies, not to make ex­cus­es and cast blame on oth­ers.