By moving to put in place a Code of Conduct for ministers (which we hope would apply equally to other senior functionaries in the political administration) President David Granger is demonstrating an awareness of the endless difficulties which the previous administration faced with the delinquent excesses of some of its own ministers, many of which have long been public knowledge and need hardly be mentioned here. More than that, he is dropping a broad hint that he has no intention of leading an administration which, at the end of its tenure, will find itself in the same dilemma.
The previous administration did not invent the disease of ministerial indiscretions. We had been experiencing those long prior to 1992, under the People’s National Congress (PNC) administration. As long ago as then, ministers of government were ‘playing God’ in one fashion or another and otherwise misbehaving in myriad ways. That having been said and as revelations of the scandalous excesses of the PPP/C unfold, there are those who are inclined to the view that the previous administration took excesses associated with abuse of power to new heights.
By taking a decision to conduct probes into the excesses perpetrated on the watch of people with power under the PPP/C administration, including stealing from the state, President Granger is sending a less than subtle message regarding his expectations of his own ministers and senior functionaries and his administration as a whole. He understands only too well that the further he goes with the various probes, audits and investigations that are currently on stream and those that are doubtless still to come, the more mindful he must be that his own government does not fall victim to the same circumstance down the road.
The political culture of this country has been littered by abuse of power. Not least among the liberties that our ministers and high officials have grown used to taking are those of assuming postures and attitudes associated with a belief that they are above any kind of reproof and in some instances above the laws of the land. We have grown used to their improper and unlawful use of state resources, forms of behaviour deliberately designed to instil awe and fear in those persons deemed to be lesser mortals; various forms of mistreatment; in some instances, the exploitation of women; and thoroughly unacceptable displays of public lawlessness.
No less scandalous has been the tendency amongst some ministers and high officials to transform their offices into bureaucratic fortresses, utilizing the excuses of “meetings” and other engagements to render themselves inaccessible to the people whom they were appointed to serve, and the cultivation of an entirely false sense of their own importance sufficiently contrived to cause them to be seen as no more than small men casting long shadows. On the whole and over the years we have come to understand that despite what is often a great deal of pomp, bombast and pretence, our ministers of government and high officials are in many instances far from paragons of virtue, or indeed, paragons of anything even remotely resembling competence.
There are instances too, recent ones to boot, in which some of them have publicly displayed a thorough absence of worthiness for the offices which they have held on account of particularly odious public displays.
An important tenet of democratic behaviour to which governments often pay less attention than they should, is the existence of a form of governance that allows the citizens fair and reasonable access to their leaders as and when the need arises, or else, to allow for the execution of ‘the people’s business’ to be effectively addressed even in the immediate absence of the minister or high official. There is really no reason why citizens seeking to claim some benefit in accordance with clearly laid down rules and procedures, ought to have to queue up, sometimes for days, even weeks, to engage a minister when the rules and procedures allow for such matters to be expedited at a lower level, except of course that the ‘system’ is often designed to reinforce that contrived sense of the minister’s importance and sometimes, frankly, to allow for the extraction of illegal considerations from their positions of authority.
As has already been mentioned there is, currently, an understandable public preoccupation with the alleged indiscretions of ministers and officials of the preceding administration which, ironically, entered office in 1992 with a symbolic banner on which was emblazoned the inscription ‘Lean, Mean and Clean.’ All of that has been washed away by a tsunami of scandal, fraud and corrupt dealings. President Granger, in the circumstances, can hardly be blamed for taking such measures as he reasonably can to ensure that his administration does not become a victim of the same fate. He clearly understands the nature of the human disposition and is not about to put his hand on his heart about some of his ministers and high officials not falling by the wayside in one respect or another as far as the manner in which they conduct themselves is concerned.
The good thing about the Code of Conduct is that it puts our present crop of ministers and high officials on notice that there will be consequences for indiscretions that have to do as much with failure to properly execute their duties as it does with other more serious infringements of the rules. That, if it can be accomplished, would amount to a landmark development in Guyana.
What we hope too is that what has already begun to be a tendency by some ministers and high officials in the present administration to have their secretaries and assistants respond to enquiries by asserting that “the minister is in a meeting” will disappear in the wake of a Code of Conduct that frowns on the creation of bureaucratic fortresses inside the various state secretariats.
The code, of course, will be useless if it does not become a public document that allows Guyanese as a whole to be cognizant of both the authority and the responsibilities of ministers and high officials, the duties to which they are bound and the limits to their authority and their privileges. There should also be particular clarity on the issue of the consequences that accrue for transgression. Much credit will attach to his presidency if Mr Granger can break what has been a protracted cycle of lawlessness among ministers of government and high officials that has bedevilled our country and affected our citizens in so many negative ways.
