Draft amendments to the Representation of the People Act (RoPA) have finally been released by the PPP/C government after more than 15 months of inexplicable dawdling. The amendments will now be subjected to “consultations” after which the process will move to Parliament – raising the possibility that a new act will not be in place for several months more with major repercussions for the local government elections schedule.
As expected, the amendments come with hefty penalties for misbehaviour of senior electoral officers to dissuade a recrudescence of the grotesque rigging attempts that scarred the March 2020 elections. Three points must be made in passing. There is no real likelihood of a recurrence of these vulgar rigging attempts against the PPP/C. In control of the levers of power and with enhanced influence at GECOM, the PPP/C government will ensure that those with a proclivity to partaking in what occurred are banished forthwith from the electoral machinery and replaced by persons it is comfortable with. The question is what will be the intentions of the replacements?
Second, not even monetary penalties and incarceration are guarantees against insidious attempts at corrupting elections. What transpired in March 2020 underlined the magnitude of the risks that key elections personnel were prepared to take to overturn the will of the people. They and their dependents had obviously been provided with sufficient comfort by the intellectual authors to encourage them to traduce and fictionalise events. That willingness to risk all could certainly reappear in the playbooks given the heightened stakes for the Presidency, pumped up by the billions of barrels of oil offshore.
Third, the amendments in of themselves do nothing to bridge the ever yawning political chasm in the country. To the contrary, they will exacerbate it. Pursuing these amendments without the context of wider reforms misses the point of March 2020 and the decades of political confrontation.
So much for the electoral reforms. What about the other safeguards that are well within the reach of the PPP/C government to ensure institutional checks and balances and that corruption doesn’t infest the sinews of all parts of government?
Again, for more than 15 months, the PPP/C government has shown no interest in fully composing and resourcing the Integrity Commission. What excuse will President Ali and his Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance offer? It is difficult to divine. Yet, PPP/C governments have historically been comfortable with an emasculated Integrity Commission despite the awareness of how pivotal this body can be in ensuring that public officials do not engage in venality. The government is quite keen to pay lip service to its commitments to the UN and Inter-American conventions against corruption but there is little sign that it is prepared to give the Integrity Commission latitude to do its work.
Given the corruption risk engendered by oil and gas revenues and the bountiful business opportunities, every single public official who entered office on August 2nd 2020 and thereafter, and was covered by the Integrity Commission schedule, should have submitted their returns so that the baseline could be established for comparisons in the next year for any signs of conspicuous wealth accumulation. Indeed, if the Commission had been functioning optimally, there would have been records pertaining to many of these officials in their earlier official capacities. We severely doubt that there is such a record in existence.
Since taking office on August 2nd 2020, the PPP/C administration is yet to show any interest in this important watchdog. It barely exists with a secretariat to receive returns but not much else. In the meanwhile, a senior official of this government, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Amerindian Affairs has been snared in a sting operation and could face charges for allegedly taking a kickback. Did she submit returns and was there anything that a fully functioning Integrity Commission could have gleaned to aid in establishing whether her conduct was aboveboard? One may never know. There have been other alarming occurrences and considering the billions of taxpayers’ dollars at stake in the awarding of large numbers contracts, the current anomie must not continue.
Following the expiration of the tenure of the life of the Integrity Commission on February 21 this year, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance, Gail Teixeira told the National Assembly in March that the process of installing a new Integrity Commission board had commenced. She expressed the hope that new members would be appointed shortly. There has been no further word on this process. No one is aware of whether returns are being submitted and if any investigations of same are being done.
Section 3(4) of the Integrity Commission Act specifies that the Chairman and other members shall be appointed by the President after consultation with the Opposition Leader. These appointments have likely been held hostage to President Ali’s unjustified refusal to engage with the Leader of the Opposition.
Guyana’s extant Act mandates that every person who is a person in public life, not being a member of the Commission, is required to file a declaration every year on or before June 30th and in cases where such persons cease to be a person in public life, within 30 days from the date on which the person ceases to be a person in public life.
It further says “A declaration under subsection (I) or (2) shall give full, true and complete particulars of the assets and liabilities as on the relevant date, and the income during a period of twelve months immediately prior to the relevant date, of the person filling the declaration (whether the assets were held by that person in his own name or in the name of any other person) and of the spouse and children of such person to the extent to which such person has knowledge of the same”.
Those who fail to submit their declarations or submit declarations that are false or incomplete shall be liable, on summary conviction, to “a fine of twenty-five thousand dollars and to imprisonment for a term of not less than six months nor more than one year, and where the offence involves the non-disclosure, by the declarant, of property, which should have been disclosed in the declaration, the magistrate convicting the person shall order the person to make full disclosure of the property within a given time and on failure to comply with the order of the magistrate within the given time, the said offence shall be deemed to be a continuing offence and the person shall be liable to a further fine of ten thousand dollars for each day on which the offence continues.”
In his Accountability Column of December 14, 2020, former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran said “It is awful that the Commission, where persons in high offices were expected to declare their assets, was headless for several years…we need a process by which we can have this important body reconstituted and perform the functions for which it has been established to ensure that we don’t have officials and others benefitting from disproportionate wealth, or ill-gotten wealth, or unjust enrichment”.
That condition continues and instead of creating a constitutional commission, the government seems to be moving in the direction of enabling further debilitation. The Commission must be reconstituted forthwith and allotted sufficient resources to discharge its very important role. Further, the chair must not be a poodle.