Arguably, there had always been reason to suspect that the Burrowes Commission of Enquiry had not slain all of the ghosts that dwell inside City Hall. At the conclusion of the enquiry some functionaries had been removed from office and Commissioner Burrowes had documented a hatful of flaws and irregularities in the administration of the municipality and a further hatful of recommendations aimed at correcting those weaknesses. Now, last week’s charges of more inefficiency and more corruption inside the municipality point to the likelihood that the Burrowes Commission may not have dug anywhere near deeply enough.
How else could City Hall have settled so quickly into what appears to be another regimen of ‘runnings’ and rackets to the extent that is suggested in the findings of last week’s submission by Mr Ramon Gaskin?
The first question which, surely, should be answered has to do with whether there was any worthwhile monitoring mechanism to oversee the effective implementation of the recommendations of the Burrowes Commission of Enquiry and whether such a mechanism, if it existed, ought not to have picked up the scandalous goings-on exposed in Mr Gaskin’s report. And now that Mr Burrowes himself has conceded that City Hall has done little if anything by way of implementing his own recommendations, one must ask whether those persons – whether or not they are directly implicated in this latest slew of alleged corrupt practices – ought not, themselves, to become the subject of investigation.
Prior to last week’s revelations the proverbial hush had fallen over the pace and progress of the implementation of the Burrowes Commission Report. City Hall, meanwhile, appeared to be proceeding in its familiar direction, traversing a path strewn with the scourges of sub-standard service, cat fights with the political administration and an inability to pay its bills, including wages and salaries to its employees. Now we are being told that the scourge of ‘runnings’ and rackets which the Commission of Enquiry had uncovered may have continued unchecked; either that or new cesspools of corruption had since fermented, with new players – both inside and outside the municipality – taking advantage of loopholes that might have been left unclosed by the Commission of Enquiry.
Either way, the report by Mr Gaskin opens a fresh can of worms and what has crawled out so far suggests that we may not yet have gotten to the bottom of the can. Hundreds of phantom workers and transactions with dummy companies which are among the revelations made in the Gaskin submission is pretty heavy stuff, surpassing in its seriousness much of what had been revealed in the Report of the Burrowes Commission itself. Certainly, one is tempted to suggest that some of the rackets that have now been exposed may have existed for years. It takes time and careful planning for an institution which is under financial pressure – and presumably close scrutiny – to the extent that it pays its workers’ salaries late every month to create 400 phantom workers and dummy companies designed to siphon off monies from the municipality.
If Mr Gaskin’s prognosis is correct then it seems as though there are stubborn – and seemingly influential – pockets of resistance to attempts to clean up City Hall. These, it appears, thrive on an inherently corrupt management culture that managed, somehow, to survive the purge that took place in the wake of the Burrowes Commission of Enquiry. If indeed that is the case then it is difficult to see how the municipality can function any longer without the immediate pursuit of emergency measures to remove that culture.
Burrowes himself has been unequivocal about his views on the Gaskin Report and has already called for a probe on its findings. While that is as it should be the outcome of such a probe will more likely than not become yet another stick with which government will chastise City Hall, though observers may argue that the political administration has not itself been a paragon of transparency as far as allegations of corruption levelled at the government are concerned.
That having been said and notwithstanding Mayor Green’s now familiar pronouncements about the government’s political chastisement of City Hall, these most recent revelations point to a municipality mired in crisis, so that legitimate questions now arise as to what action the Minister of Local Government is going to take to remove corrupt members of the city’s administration on this occasion since the removal of only two senior functionaries the last time around was clearly insufficient.
