A Presentation to Trinidad and Tobago
Transparency Institute
Anti-Corruption Conference
Hilton Hotel, March 20th 2015
A few weeks ago, Justice Gillian Lucky sentenced two men to jail terms, one for 10 months for drug trafficking and the other for 5 months for shooting with intent to do grievous bodily harm and robbery. The thing was that the two men who eventually pleaded guilty had already spent 7 years and 8 months and 10 years and 2 months, respectively, in the remand yard awaiting trial! This is by no means an unusual story. The remand yard which accommodates prisoners awaiting trial is overflowing. The prisons are overflowing.
A murder trial by jury can last 6 months to a year, occupying the time of one judge and several lawyers. There is a large backlog of persons awaiting trial for murder. Criminal Proceedings Rules still being worked on. The abolition of the preliminary enquiry had to reset after the Section 34 scandal.
This country is yet to record a conviction for serious white collar crime. The Piarco accused are yet to see the high court for trial of their matter and it is now almost 20 years since the offences were allegedly committed!
The criminal justice system is probably not dispensing justice given the delays that are common and the prison system is helping to foster criminality.
The criminal justice system is broken
A few weeks ago, the chairman of the Teaching Service Commission all but threw his hands up in the air when he testified before a parliamentary committee that there were several hundred cases of complaints against teachers to be adjudicated and each had to be given ‘due process’. Two years ago the Education Minister complained to the President about the failure of the TSC to appoint a Chief Education Officer and two years ago Sat Maharaj said the Hindu board would not wait on the TSC to discipline errant teachers. The Express in a recent editorial commented on the fact that it had taken the TSC two years to adjudicate the complaint against the teacher now barred by irate parents from a Muslim school. Complaints have been made under UNC, PNM, NAR about the TSC and the other service commissions.
Every government has sought to circumvent the Public Service Commission by using contract workers, a practice which had the downside of opening the worker to exploitation and injustice.
The Police Service Commission is near powerless to appoint a Police Commissioner, so convoluted is the process with which nobody is happy, not the government in power, not the opposition, and not the Acting CoP. So why is this so?
The service commissions are broken institutions
The IPLA of 2000 was a well-intentioned piece of legislation but it was not focused on the right objectives. In my view, the IC should be heavily focused on detection, investigation and prosecution of serious wrongdoing. It should be an institution which is feared and respected. Our IC [Integrity Commission] is neither feared nor respected. It is now a political joke to say you are reporting X or Y to the IC to score cheap political points and as a form of political mud-slinging, knowing full well that the investigation will take at least 3 months or more likely more and will come to nought.
The IC claims that the declarations it extracts from persons in public life are of some forensic or other value. I still don’t see how. And the definition of persons in public life is drawn too wide, including as it does persons substantively in the private sector whose entire financial affairs become subject to IC scrutiny because they elect to serve on some state board or other. The IC has now proposed some amendments to the IPLA to give it some teeth, but it still seems to want to stop short of becoming the fearsome pit bull that it should be.
The Integrity Commission is a congenitally deformed institution
Frustrated with the Report of the Salaries Review Commission, Parliament attempted to use the legitimate concern of long retired judges about their pensions to introduce poorly conceived, but very generous adjustments to the pension benefits of parliamentarians. The frustration was understandable. The SRC has taken much too long to do the research and make recommendations for senior public sector salaries resulting in justified annoyance. But the SRC says it has no resources to do its work and must depend on the CPO. The CPO is busy with negotiations and in turn requires the government to provide the resources to get the studies done.
The Salaries Review Commission is a broken institution
Commissions of inquiry sit for months and years at great cost to the taxpayers, during which witnesses who are summoned thumb their noses at the summons and do not show up, and the reports are written and presented and promptly shelved and forgotten. Piarco Airport, Uff, 1990 Coup, now Las Alturas. But the list can go back a couple centuries!
But not only commissions of inquiry. Forensic reports, from which people like Bob Lindquist made lots of money, reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission on corporate wrong doing, police investigations into missing files, all end up amounting to nought. And we all know that it will end up to nought and the people who initiate the investigations know they will end up to nought but launch them because they look good and they feel that form equates to substance, that planning equates to performance! We make a great show of appearing to do something when things go egregiously wrong, and then do nothing!
The Education system is broken. With an unstated focus on throughput, many children pass through the system, primary to secondary, and emerge unable to read and write. And they emerge angry and disaffected and beaten down! Tertiary level graduates, even Law School graduates cannot write proper English, much less use language with skill, subtlety and creativity.
All around us, our institutions are broken, limping, pretending to function — the Media, Carnival, the Central Bank, the Central Statistical Office, the Universities, the Licensing Office, the Police Service. Broken institutions deliver mediocrity, and we then ratchet down our expectations and our standards to suit what they deliver. Think about that when you cross a bridge designed by one of our engineers, or lie on the operating table with one of our Medical School graduates over you or your child with his scalpel.
Broken institutions foster corruption
But we must understand that broken institutions also foster corruption. Helen Drayton made the insightful observation, when examining an Ansa McAl poll on crime. She said: “Only last week, in the results of an Ansa McAl poll, citizens identified crime as more urgent than public corruption and poor leadership. What is ironic is the way public corruption is compartmentalized from other crimes when it is the worst of crimes, including blood crimes.” In fact the pollsters themselves framed corruption as an issue different from crime, as if corruption is not a real crime!
I have argued that corruption is endemic in this country because our systems and processes, that is, our institutions, do not work. They don’t work because we view them with suspicion, worried that the outcome it produces for us will not be fair, that it will be influenced by our ethnicity, our class position, our gender, our complexion or the straightness or crinkliness of our hair. And our suspicion leads us to subvert the said institutions by bribery, contact, grease hand, bobol. And our very acts of subversion contribute to the failure of the institutions to function properly, and hence confirm our suspicions. Who among us believes that it was innocent mistake or the naïveté of a Judicial Support Officer which caused files from the Judiciary to end up in the law offices of a private attorney? Whether it was or not, the Judiciary has been dealt a grievous blow!
Why Are Our Institutions Failing?
In the last few years, my mind has been exercised with the question: What accounts for our broken institutions, or as Lloyd Best used to say, institutions in a state of “pre-collapse”?
First, I am convinced that the problem lies with the society’s elite. It is we, after all, who are in charge and who are responsible. Not the ordinary man in the street! Not the bandits with the guns! Not the unproductive CEPEP workers! Not the teachers and policemen and public servants who don’t work or are indifferent! It is we, those who lead in the private sector and the public sector, in the judiciary, in the trades unions, and in the professions – it is we who are responsible for the place.
But there are things that we, the elite, need to understand about ourselves. It is these things which deeply influence our leadership, which perpetuate broken institutions and which perpetuate corruption. Some people have challenged the idea that our society has an elite at all! In a sense those critics are right. The key characteristic of an elite is that, individually and collectively, it takes responsibility for the place and seek to defend its institutions from attack, even against members of the elite themselves! Our elite are not invested in the place. We always have one eye on a route of escape in case the whole thing comes tumbling down. We have one foot here and one foot there; a Trini passport plus a green card, or Canadian or British passport.
Second, from inception of this society, elite status was obtained by ascription, not by merit or even by wealth. Upward mobility has always been hard because of the barriers of colour and gender. We don’t encourage celebrity. Celebrities are to be brought down to earth quick, quick!
Third, we are as Lloyd Best described us, ‘unresponsible’. That is, because while we may get where we are by ascription or even with false qualifications, we may not know what responsibility requires of us. It is what my brother, Trevor Farrell, used to call ‘two-storey’ ignorance — people do not know that they do not know. And being Trini, it does not take long before they begin to act and pretend that they really do know and always knew! Newly-appointed government ministers seem particularly prone to this affliction. Unresponsibility and the ignorance that is at its base fosters corruption. We can see that syndrome in the Las Alturas fiasco – a poorly conceived housing policy (which promotes dependency), an ill-conceived target, given by vaps, to the HDC, the use of a Chinese contractor and Chinese labour under questionable circumstances, and professionals who skirt their duty.
So we populate the leadership of key institutions with persons who are unqualified, or unresponsible, and who do not embrace the ethos of institution-preservation and institution-building, because they just don’t know. They focus on the ‘hardware’ but don’t understand the ‘software’ of the institutions they are put to run, and when that happens, you begin to get bent and broken institutions. I remind us that it takes years or decades to build an institution, but it may take months to break it down!
What Do We Do?
So what do we do? How do we halt the slide into anarchy or duendom as Leroy Clarke might describe it? The first thing we have to recognize is that ethnic competition is a major challenge to any agenda focused on repairing and restoring our institutions. An important element of the competition is the control of key institutions of state –the intelligence services, the Police, the Army, the Judiciary, the DPP, the universities and of course, the Treasury. One of the effects of ethnic competition is that it is seen to be preferred to have control, even of a broken institution, once there is assurance that it serves one’s purposes. The gaze is never lifted above one’s ethnic navel. But such a gaze, such a focus, is myopic and ultimately will be self-defeating. We have to rise above, lift our gaze, our focus to what is really important and enduring. This is not easy, because we have to escape from ourselves, our socialization and upbringing and deny the instinctive, visceral responses we have to people who are not like us. We have to embrace human respect as a fundamental personal value, and see worth and dignity and potential in every face we encounter.
Second, Equity. Equity is not an easy concept. It is not coterminous with ‘equality of opportunity’ because ‘equality of opportunity’ assumes that everyone starts the race from the same place and with the same capabilities. Sometimes some competitors need to be handicapped in order to produce equity. That is a form of ‘affirmative action’. Equity is doing right by the individual. It is to take the individual’s situation fully into account. In the legal profession, lawyers know that courts of equity may produce outcomes that vary with the length of the ‘Chancellor’s foot’. That is as it should be as morality and conscience are fundamental to Equity. Leaders of institutions must develop and train their consciences so that our institutions invariably produce equitable outcomes.
Third, Humility. I am no expert on humility! But I try to be sensitive to what I do not know. And when I do not know, or know enough, I seek the counsel of those who do know. One of the fatal flaws of leadership here is that we are encouraged to believe that we are supposed to know everything. In developed countries, knowledgeable and accomplished businessmen employ consultants to advise them. Here our businessmen counsel themselves on every aspect of their business and will probably seek only the services of a lawyer when they get into trouble. This is one of the key aspects of the concept of “servant leadership” as articulated by Robert Greenleaf. Leaders don’t always lead from in front. Sometimes they are prepared to follow those who know better than they do what needs to be done in particular circumstances.
Fourth, Courage. I have come to understand that ours is a society that was founded and maintained by violence and fear and intimidation. We are a traumatized people. Our politicians seek to intimidate us. Everyone is wary, because the government is so large and so intrusive that everybody depends on the government and hence politicians for their livelihood and their business success. Business leaders, university academics, lawyers, public servants all perceive themselves to be dependent on the government and must succumb to the fear of victimization. So they tread warily. They voice support for the PIP — party in power — whether that party in power is principled or not. Power must be feared and obeyed, until at least we can escape. So we need Courage to stand up and do what is right. We do have courageous people here — Reggie Dumas, Sunity Maharaj, Emile Elias, Fr Clyde Harvey, Douglas Mendes, Martin Daly, and I will name only one politician, David Abdulah — exemplars to be followed and I think, emulated. I do not mean to suggest that they are always right, but it is clear to me that they are motivated by their convictions about what is right and they are not afraid to speak out and to act. To preserve and build our institutions, leaders must have Courage.
Fifth, “Mindfulness”. I am grateful to an old friend, Nazeer Sultan, for articulating this concept, which encapsulates the others. It means that we always engage our cognitive brain and suppress our primitive, instinctive brain. Our primitive instinctive brain is programmed for survival. It is selfish; it is tribal; it is disposed to violence. Mindfulness means that we take everything into consideration when confronted with an issue, not just our own selfish interests. It means we respect and value every human person we encounter, especially those who work with us. It means that we pause and bring our ethical training to the fore when confronted with ethical issues. We need mindful leadership.
These all add up to Principled Leadership, the kind of leadership on the part of our elite that will ensure the preservation and growth of our institutions and thereby minimize the scourge of corruption that has stalked our land for centuries! Yes we need laws, and we have them! But it is really principled leadership of our institutions, including those responsible for enforcing the laws, that will make a difference to the problem of corruption in our society.
