Last week Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance Gail Teixeira was in full flow on the subject of the corruption rankings issued by Transparency International. It was in essence a repeat of what Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo had said earlier this year, except that he was referring specifically to Guyana, while she extended her comments to encompass the entire Caribbean region.
At the time Ms Teixeira was delivering the keynote address at the opening of the 9th Annual Conference of the Commonwealth Caribbean Association of Integrity Commissions and Anti-Corruption bodies, and was reported as saying that the Guyana government did not recognise the score issued by the corruption watchdog institution. She enjoined other Caribbean nations to also repudiate the organisation’s rankings and the negative portrayal of the region which was being conveyed. “The Caribbean region keeps getting notoriety in the international media for [being] havens of corruption and [a] number of articles are showing that we have massive corruption in the Caribbean islands; we have to be offended by that as Caribbean Community countries,” she was quoted as saying.
She went on to complain that the methods involved in arriving at the placements were “non-empirical” and “non-scientific”, and that only two or three people in a country would evaluate that country and then place it on a global scale. “That gives two or three people an enormous amount of power that they weren’t given by the electorate…” she said.
The Minister then proceeded to comment on the fact that the TI ranking system revealed that the most corrupt countries were south of the equator, and the least in the north. This, she considered, reflected “prejudices and biases against … the developing world.” It would be difficult to imagine that anyone listening to her took her seriously; was she really trying to suggest that in terms of corruption Guyana, for example, equated to mature Scandinavian democracies?
If the representatives at the meeting were a little taken aback by the fact that they were there to discuss questions of corruption, while the lead speaker was suggesting by implication it was not a major issue in the region, they said nothing publicly. But they certainly would have been far more taken aback by what she had to say about how TI collected its data, since they would have known she was talking nonsense. And the fact that Ms Teixeira emphasised that hers was a Government of Guyana position made the matter worse, since here she was officially promoting what was known to be a rank falsehood in an anti-corruption forum, no less.
It was a case of the PPP/C government applying its own distorted norms to the region as a whole. As it is the party sees corruption like everything else as a political issue, and has so far shown itself incapable of moving to the more objective approach which characterises nations serious about tackling the problem. Two months ago Vice President Jagdeo launched his own diatribe against Transparency International, which he too erroneously assumed had derived Guyana’s score and ranking for its Corruption Perceptions Index from a report sent by its local affiliate here, usually referred to by its acronym TIGI.
“Does it [the report] go to their board for discussion and if so, did that report go to their board and then shouldn’t the citizens of the country see the report that they send up secretly to Transparency International to falsely influence them?” the DPI quoted him as asking. Inevitably he went on to express his belief that TIGI was anti-PPP, and adverted to instances where that body had overlooked major corruption under the previous APNU+AFC government. “[M]ore citizens felt there was greater corruption in that period, yet the local TIGI office sent up a report saying that people felt the new government, the PNC government, was not corrupt, less corrupt,” he said.
The problem is that TIGI has absolutely nothing to do with the generation of the TI Index. The current government does not seem to be short of advisors, so perhaps one of them for a start might like to provide it with a copy of what Transparency International has to say on its website about its sources, to wit: “Each country’s score is a combination of at least 3 data sources drawn from 13 different corruption surveys and assessments. These data sources are collected by a variety of reputable institutions, including the World Bank and the World Economic Forum.
“CPI scores do not reflect the views of Transpa-rency International or our staff.” One hesitates to think that Mr Jagdeo would classify the World Bank and World Economic Forum, for example, as being biased against the PPP and therefore lacking credibility.
The problem is there were corrections thereafter in the public arena regarding the mistake about the sources for the Corruption Perceptions Index, so either Ms Teixeira and her government didn’t see them, or they chose to disregard them. While there will be few consequences for that locally, at a regional or international level it will have the effect of bringing the administration into disrepute and casting doubt on their commitment to the elimination of corruption. As things stand TI has global standing as a gauge of the problem, and the Minister of Parliamentary Affairs with her misplaced comments is in no position to change that status.
If she appeared to downplay the extent of the regional corruption problem in one part of her speech, at another the Minister did talk about measures to address it. She said institutions must explain to the electorate what they are doing to counter corruption challenges, and advocated involving ordinary citizens as the “eyes and ears” of their communities. As an extension of this she recommended the idea of anti-corruption citizen reporters. That was not the time in which to elaborate on how that could possibly work in a place like Guyana, but in any case, citizens must have avenues for reporting and feel safe about doing so, and there must be effective bodies which can receive such reports.
Ms Teixeira did not have much to say about institutions, although she did indicate that strengthened institutions and laws for accountability were important to address emerging threats. However, it has been observed by a number of commentators as well as this newspaper before, that Guyana currently suffers from institutional as well as legislative weakness where corruption is concerned. Since the conference was attended by some representatives from Integrity Commissions, perhaps a member of such a body from Trinidad was present. Nothing illustrates the difference between the effectiveness of different regional institutions than that between the Trinidad and Guyana Integrity Commissions. The former is particularly robust in terms of its actions, while the latter so far is exactly the opposite.
Finance Minister Ashni Singh also spoke to the gathering, remarking that by ensuring every citizen experienced transparency and efficiency advances could be made in combating corruption. To this end, he said, a team was working on recording the processes involved in citizen interaction with the state in order to identify areas where these could be made more efficient. “[W]hatever our interaction is, with whichever institution, it must be based on transparent, predictable processes that are designed to be efficient and eliminate citizens’ frustration,” he said. While this will be undoubtedly good news for the public it will not in and of itself eliminate, or even almost eliminate the problem where it has become entrenched.
The government likes to point out that Guyana has ratified the UN Convention Against Corruption in 2008 and the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption in 2000. But as with all the other international conventions it has signed, the proof of its commitment lies in the implementation. In addition, it likes to recite the truism that effective instruments in the fight against corruption are openness, transparency, and accountability. Dr Singh himself repeated this last year at an anti-corruption training workshop. But again, words mean little if there is no implementation.
And implementation will be obstructed if the government cannot break free of its political bonds and see the problem in an apolitical light and operate accordingly. Guyana’s low score on the Corruption Perception Index is not a reflection of Transparency International’s bias; it is a reflection of the fact that Guyana has a problem. All that Minister Teixeira likely succeeded in doing at the Conference, was persuade the other regional participants that the government here was not fully committed to addressing corruption.
