Last week Mr Ralph Ramkarran caused something of a minor ferment – at least among the political pundits – with his column in the Weekend Mirror, where he called for the government to take action against “pervasive” corruption. As he pointed out in a letter to this newspaper on Friday, this was not the first time he had written on the subject, since another article of his had been published in the Mirror more than a year ago. However, it might be observed that that piece was a good deal less forthright than the one which appeared last week, in addition to which the extent of the corruption which he has acknowledged has been a great deal more than a year or two in the making. Prior to that, he had not spoken publicly on the matter as far as anyone is aware.
Be that as it may, the question is what measures need to be taken in the face of a problem which is “pervasive.” Mr Ramkarran referred, among other things, to “new, more advanced and comprehensive legislation and administrative programmes,” assistance from organizations like the United Nations and the Carter Center, and setting up the National Procurement Commission. Since there are so many areas of government which are afflicted by corruption, it may well be that in the case of specific departments we should seek technical assistance from international agencies with experience in dealing with this kind of problem. It may be too, that there is need for “more advanced and comprehensive legislation,” but the truth of the matter is that we already have legislation on the statute books which is intended to confront the problem, but the mechanisms to make it fully effective have not been activated, or it simply has not been implemented. While there may be many gaps, nevertheless had even the existing laws been enforced we wouldn’t be in the position we are in now.
Democratic societies which respect people’s rights and are underpinned by the rule of law, need autonomous institutions which are independently monitored. Once everything is an appendage of central government there is bound to be official corruption at one level or another, because government will be in a position to exert its influence. And once it can, it will. Getting independent institutions or commissions is notoriously difficult in this divided society of ours, not least because no one recognizes any individual as being truly independent and appointments usually come down to a question of what the balance between one side and the other on any given body should be. Where there has been no agreement between the major political parties on the composition of an institution or on who should chair it, then it simply cannot be established – or as in the case of the Ethnic Relations Commission for a time, is established illegally.
The government over the last twenty years has been so obsessed with control of every facet of life, that it is difficult to find an institution which is truly autonomous, although the current National Assembly, following the election of November 28, is working its way around to it. The corollary to this is that those bodies which are supposed to monitor government operations have also been affected, and these are the watchdogs of corruption. The most important of these by far is the Auditor General, whose activities have been very much circumscribed by the government since a distinctly independent-minded Mr Goolsarran was eased out. Since then, Mr Deodat Sharma has been acting in the position, a situation hardly conducive to independence from government. He cannot be appointed because he does not have the qualifications for the post. Furthermore, a senior member of staff who does have the qualifications happens to be the wife of the Minister of Finance, a clear conflict of interest situation.
We were given to understand last week that any appointment of senior officers in the Auditor General’s office (although not the Auditor General) requires the prior approval of the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, but when it met recently, there was the usual chasm between the two sides. The acting Auditor General sought to make three senior appointments, but the five opposition members would not concur in this and expressed themselves concerned about the conflict of interest. Following that, we reported two government members, Ms Teixeira and Mr Lumumba, as accusing the opposition of “stymieing efforts at rapprochement.” There seemed to be no sense that rapprochement in and of itself is not the issue; the issue is to have an Auditor General’s Office which is independent of government influence, and is seen by the public to be independent. It was Mr Christopher Ram in the columns of this newspaper who long ago first pointed to the problems in the Auditor General’s office, and the need to have it adequately staffed and provided with the necessary resources for the job it had to do.
While this newspaper was told by Mr Greenidge that the PAC had not yet made efforts to deal with the appointment of a substantive Auditor General, there has been one advance which was the consequence of a motion which he was planning to bring in the House. As it was, he had to withdraw it, because the government decided to pre-empt him. However the end was achieved really doesn’t matter, but now the Office of the Auditor General has been removed from the list of budget agencies, and will draw its finances directly from the Consolidated Fund, making it once again autonomous. That needs to be the case too with the commissions, as Mr Greenidge pointed out.
The other critical body – the Public Procurement Commission – has already been mentioned. The fact is that this commission has not been put in place for more than a decade because the government and opposition cannot agree on its membership. Mr Ramkarran placed the full blame for the dereliction on the “rejection by the opposition of the government’s proposal that they nominate some members and the government nominates the others.” Instead, he averred, the opposition wanted all the members to be agreed, and that this had created gridlock. This oversimplifies the story, since he omitted to mention that at one stage there were reports that the government wanted to appoint three of the five members, leaving the opposition with two – an arrangement with implications which hardly require elaboration.
The point which Mr Ramkarran has not acknowledged is that unless the ruling party commits itself to making even the monitoring institutions we have already truly independent of government, then corruption will continue. In addition, it will not matter how much new legislation we bring in, or how many experts from international institutions come to advise us, the situation will not change if the government does not genuinely want to eliminate corruption as far as that is possible to do, and if it is not prepared to allow any investigation that might be set up to lead where it may.
It is not therefore a question of whether the opposition members will outnumber the government appointees on a commission like the Public Procurement Commission; if everything is being done by the book, and if the administration wants to ensure that things are being done by the book, then it doesn’t matter who sits on it, provided that they meet the constitutional requirement of having expertise and experience in “procurement, legal, financial and administrative matters.” By not insisting on qualifications rather than political affiliation in relation to appointees, the government is conveying the unfortunate impression that it is not really seeking to address corruption, and only wants cosmetic changes.
Corruption has many tentacles and dealing with all its manifestations in the different departments is going to be a long haul, although as said above, there are things that can be done now if there is the will to do them. But in addition to the two key bodies mentioned above, there is another institution which has been in abeyance for a long time but which also has a part to play in any anti-corruption drive, and that is the Ombudsman. The government has provided no rational account of why an Ombudsman has not been appointed, but as has been said before in the editorial columns of this newspaper, it is critical that one is.
Corruption does not flourish as well in the daylight as in the darkness, and one thing November 28 has done is allow for a ray or two of light to illuminate some matters which have possible bearing on corrupt practices in the governmental arena. If the governing party sets its face against transparency by employing blocking tactics of one kind or another, it will be a hard slog to get the kinds of institutions and monitoring systems which are essential in a true democracy where the rule of law holds sway. If it chooses to go that route nevertheless, it should recognize that it will have a political cost. It has probably paid a price already.
