Correcting Guyana’s unflattering image as a corruption-ridden country will have to be a priority of his administration if some of his other goals like attracting foreign investment are to be realised. President Donald Ramotar is clearly aware of this as indeed he is seemingly aware that the time has long passed for seeking to make political capital out of the absurd insistence that there is no evidence of corruption in our state institutions or among state officials. The evidence to the contrary is, quite simply, too overwhelming.
Last week, President Ramotar, used the opportunity of a public forum to pronounce openly on bribery and corruption in both the public and private sectors and you get a sense that he may be ready to abandon what used to be a ‘holier than thou’ posture on the corruption issue so that his administration can proceed to the next stage of seriously tackling the problem.
Businessmen have been less pretentious, more open on corruption, admitting that it exists while suggesting that doing business in Guyana necessitates joining one corruption bandwagon or another. You either do so, they suggest, or your business gets left behind.
This particular point has been made in relation to customs clearance for goods being imported into the country.
There are other circumstances in which high officials are ideally positioned to ‘sell’ particular services controlled by the state to private businesspeople seeking those services. The assigning of state contracts for the provision of goods and services and for works in the infrastructure sector are good examples. Here too, there is a widespread and in some instances altogether justifiable belief that public procurement processes are fixed to facilitate contract allocation based on rationale that frequently have nothing to do with merit.
On the whole, one gets the impression that an entire institution of corruption, with its own sophisticated rules and mores has been created and that much of it exists away from the public glare. Somewhere, in an essay on corruption, the practice was described as “the covert privatisation of government functions.”
At last week’s Financial Crimes forum which focused heavily though not exclusively on money-laundering, US Ambassador D Brent Hardt, in making his presentation, dealt what the US clearly believes is another disturbing dimension to corruption in Guyana. Hardt pronounced bluntly on what he said was the desirability of the government ensuring that the country’s economy is kept “in the hands of legitimate businesses, hard-working entrepreneurs and law-abiding citizens.” This, of course, is just another way of saying that Washington wants to see a much more robust effort on the part of government to suppress money laundering, evidence of which sometimes appears to manifest itself in some business enterprises and more particularly in the eye-catching manner in which those businesses emerge.
At one level, tackling corruption is about moving to put in place what we customarily describe as enabling mechanisms including enhanced legislation, adequate policing mechanisms, more efficient systems for expediting procedures that involve the intervention of the state and incentives designed to help remove the temptation for state officials to fall victim to corruption. Again, that is only part of the equation. Official attitudes to fighting corruption will, at an entirely different level, be driven by just who benefits from corrupt practices since it is widely believed that there are instances in which the very officials whose tasks it is to fashion and implement the law benefit from the absence of its application. More than that and again as has been widely suggested, in circumstances where persons whose credentials are questionable become fixtures in the business community, efforts to fashion a business culture in which corruption is, at the very least, kept to a minimum are likely to fail since, at one level, there will never really be a shortage of President Ramotar’s “bribers” and ‘takers’.
The high-profile nature of last week’s Financial Crimes forum including the involvement of western diplomatic missions and regional and international organisations in its planning and execution appears designed to send a message that the Ramotar administration can anticipate being brought under renewed pressure to seriously address the issue of official corruption in the society. There are varying views on where the government might start in the quest to curb official corruption. Enhanced legislation, for example, is highly desirable though not a goal that will be accomplished overnight. Even without new legislation, however, there are key issues that can be addressed in the immediate term including the application of World Bank procurement guidelines that frown on “the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting, directly or indirectly, of anything of value to influence the action of a public official in the procurement process or in contract execution.” In such instances there is evidence of corrupt practices, where state officials abuse public authority in pursuit of what, invariably, is considerable personal gain. At the level of the business sector there may well be cases of ‘bid-fixing’; instances in which a limited number of enterprises collude to win particular bids. These are among the examples of those procedures referred to earlier that are carefully concealed from the public domain.
The Ramotar administration’s anti-corruption pursuits can begin to make some headway if it moves to break down those walls that remove transparency from many state procedures and renders them more visible to the public thereby creating a watchdog mechanism that provides increases the risk that corrupt practices will be detected. It can, for example, install an inhibiting mechanism that restricts functionaries who might be inclined to abuse the powers of the state by applying the World Bank standard of frowning on the acceptance by state officials of anything that might influence those officials in the execution of their official duties. That may only be a starting point in what is an uphill battle against corruption. It is, however, as good a place as any to start.
