Last Wednesday, with a bluntness that some may regard as diplomatically indelicate, Common-wealth Secretary General, Baroness Patricia Scotland asserted that in the midst of the various COVID-19 emergencies that have arisen here in the Caribbean, we can expect the occurrence of instances of unwholesome opportunism amongst those in our midst whose sensitivities are finely tuned to recognize and extract exploitative advantage from circumstances of challenge and tragedy.
“We can expect, fraud, bribery, theft, and other criminal practices…for immoral gain” as a result of the emergencies that have arisen out of the COVID-19 pandemic. These practices will materialize, she said, “as people seek to exploit this terrible situation for their own immoral gain,” is part of what the Dominica-born former Attorney General for England and Wales was quoted as saying during a virtual forum of the Commonwealth Caribbean Association of Integrity Commissions and Anti -Corruption Bodies last week.
Frankly, there is hardly need for Baroness Scotland to ponder the diplomatic correctness of her pronouncement, the likely truth of her pronouncement being the infinitely more troubling matter. Truth be told the practice of turning human challenges/tragedies into personal gain is now well-entrenched (in various forms) in this part of the world. Indeed, some of those instances of practices designed to realize what Baroness Scotland describes as “immoral gain” have long been occurring here in the region, albeit on a less grand scale than obtains elsewhere in the world, though, as is invariably the case elsewhere, it is the poor, less-privileged that are the victims.
Take Guyana, for example, where the advent of COVID-19 coincided with an uncontrollable wave of retail black-marketing that shoved the prices for sanitizers and disinfectants ‘through the roof,’ the pursuit beginning with established retail stores and eventually trickling down to street traders, seasoned hustlers who are never slow to take advantage of opportunity.
And once official advisories had counseled that face masks were part of the recommended response, those too were pressed into service on the black market, rumours flying in the process that stocks of masks acquired for official distribution were also finding their way into the retail stream.
Mind you, there is every reason to believe that with the onset of COVID-19 Guyana has not been singular in the perpetration of some of these practices in the region.
Long before COVID-19 we had become seasoned campaigners in other kinds of rackets, not least the importation by ‘hustlers’ with connections to officialdom of expired food and drugs, among other things, these rackets flying in the face of weak and powerless state agencies hopelessly inhibited by circumstances that restrain them in their ability to effectively enforce the law. All of this, provides incontrovertible evidence that the region is now firmly hitched to the international bandwagon of “fraud, bribery, theft, and other criminal practices……….for immoral gain” of which the Commonwealth Secretary General speaks and which, having regard to the advent of COVID-19 may well grow into something much more powerful.
Back in March this year a report emanating from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) declined to name specific countries in an article which sourced to the World Health Organization (WHO) the assertion that “a growing volume of fake medicines linked to the coronavirus are on sale in developing countries.” Setting those aside, INTERPOL, according to the OECD ‘report,’ “has also seen an increase in fake medical products related to COVID-19” including “fake COVID-19 tests and personal protective equipment such as facemasks and hand sanitizers.” If no reliable information is available as to whether these “rackets” may not have already established connections amongst pockets of eagle-eyed profiteers in the region, there is no reason to believe that this may not in fact be the case.
To return to the Guyana situation, based on what we know about the now commonplace importation of expired foods and fake drugs, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that this pre-existing network of illegal importers and their official ‘helpers’ can become connected to the new rackets that have arisen out of the advent of COVID-19 to deepen the existing culture of “fraud, bribery, theft, and other criminal practices” to which Baroness Scotland refers.
