As this newspaper indicated, the report was favourable to the administration’s performance. The six criteria considered essential to evaluate the strength of public governance – control of corruption, government effectiveness, political stability, regulatory quality, rule of law and voice and accountability – all show that the country has made relative progress.
Analysts may differ about the Bank’s evaluation of factors such as ‘control of corruption’ when public officials, police and customs officers and regional administration officials have been arraigned in the courts by the dozen on charges of corruption. The Bank’s generous ranking given to ‘rule of law’ since 1996 – during the most lawless period since independence when the greatest number of murders and massacres occurred – is also questionable.
The Bank is about business, however, and here it expresses concern. The report refers to the impact of crime and the administration of justice on the well-being of the population and private sector investment. In its survey of manufacturing firms, the report states that “43 per cent of participants with recent experience in the courts identified the legal system as a major obstacle to their business operations. Another 30 per cent considered crime to be among the top constraints to business. Thirty-eight per cent of the participants in the survey had been victims of theft or vandalism.”
Commissioner of Police Henry Greene himself confessed at the Guyana Police Force’s 170th anniversary ceremony last July that the rising rates of armed robbery with violence and robbery with aggravation were “worrisome.” Head of the Police Criminal Investigation Department Seelall Persaud the previous November confirmed that, on average, there were now about two armed robberies every day.
At the lower level, small gangs of two or three young men armed often with only one rented pistol among them pounce on internet cafés, petrol stations, restaurants, vendors, visitors from overseas and any other vulnerable targets.
At the higher level, narcotics-trafficking and the contraband trade flourish. These are the really rich crimes that corrupt public officers in the law-enforcement and regulatory agencies. Gun-running, through which petty gangsters get their pistols for their day-to-day crimes, is an offshoot. That these trans-national trades are lucrative is apparent from the growth in governmental graft. The number of cases involving integrity in the Customs and Trade Administration and the Customs Anti-Narcotics Unit alone has been staggering.
The Police Force seems powerless to prevent the plague of graft, contraband and armed robberies. The annual survey published by Ram & McRae – Business Outlook Survey 2010 – rated the Guyana Police Force and the Ministry of Home Affairs “poorly” in terms of effectiveness in the public sector.
Yet the Bank has been pouring funds into the Citizens Security and Justice Sector Reform Programmes. But the extent to which these programmes will contribute to the solution of this country’s crime problems and the administration of justice in order to improve the business environment is questionable.
The IDB is yet to learn – as the UK and USA governments already have – that interventions in the security and justice sectors will be a waste of time until the Guyana Government itself gets serious about the suppression of the narco-trafficking and contraband businesses.
