Barbados AG says fight against corruption is a ‘cultural battle’

BRIDGETOWN — The Attorney-General of Barbados Mia Mottley said yesterday that in the fight against corruption in public affairs, the battle must be waged on all fronts, including the private sector, and treated as a “cultural” problem that must be eradicated.

She made a strong plea against any attempt to treat corruption as a cancer that afflicts the public sector.

“This corruption tendency, or as Trinidadians call it “bobol” syndrome, said Mottley, was also very much a problem for the private sector where bribery and greed by those who cannot easily explain their wealth remain as offensive as the practices of those in government services who enrich themselves at the expense of the general public.

The attorney-general was at the time delivering the keynote address at a one-day “National Conference on the Inter-American Convention against Corruption (IACC) and its Implementation”, organised by the Organisation of American States in co-operation with her ministry and the Law Faculty of the UWI (Cave Hill Campus).

She said that while the convention was quite laudable and Barbados had signed on to it, as also done by many of its CARICOM partners, she felt that any domestic legislation for its implementation must, of necessity, ensure that the laws extend equally to corruption in the private sector, since corruption was not a “monopoly of governments”.

Mottley, who is also minister of home affairs, said she found it necessary to ensure a broad definition of corruption since she felt that the draft legislation on the IACC, prepared for Barbados by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), in co-operation with the OAS Secretariat, and which she was seeing for the first time, did not focus more widely to incorporate corruption in the private sector.

However, the DPP, Charles Leacock, in a summary presentation of the draft legislation on the IACC for implementation by Barbados, explained that while the attorney-general had related to a much “wider and quite understandable concept of corruption in public life”, the IACC, as an instrument to eradicate this cancer, did extend to other areas, including the private sector.

Speaking in the absence of the attorney-general, who excused herself after her address to keep another official commitment, the DPP explained some of the major provisions of the IACC as an initiative of the OAS that resulted from the first Summit of the Americas in 1994 to develop and build consensus against all forms of corruption that work against transparency, honesty and good governance.

In a message to the conference from OAS Secretary-General Cesar Gaviria, read by the Jamaica-born representative of the OAS Office in Barbados, Wendell Goodin, participants were provided with the rationale for the day’s event.

Asking, rhetorically, the OAS consider the fight against corruption so important, Gaviria said that first, it has to do with something that is of “the essence” of the Inter-American System, which he identified as “the preservation and strengthening of democracy”.

This, said the OAS secretary-general, would have been uppermost in the minds of hemispheric leaders when they adopted the “Inter-American Democratic Charter” in which they declared that “transparency in government activities, probity, responsible public administration on the part of governments, respect for social rights and freedom of expression and of the press, are essential components of the exercise of democracy…”.

In her address, Attorney-General Mottley said that neither the public nor private sector had a monopoly on corruption.

Nor, she added, was it a “monopoly” of the poor and developing states, as the industrialised nations would want some to believe, and as Caribbean people were learning about in “this post-Enron” phase, a reference to the growing exposures of corporate corruption in the USA.

Jagdeo gets confidence vote, but PPP keeps leadership structure

GEORGETOWN — In what is viewed here as a “confidence vote” in his leadership as president of Guyana, Bharrat Jagdeo has topped the list of those elected to the governing People’s Progressive Party (PPP) 35-member Central Committee at the party’s 27th Biennial Congress that concluded on Sunday.

But the congress opted to retain its leadership structure without a formal leader and chairman and let the party’s general secretary, Donald Ramotar, perform a leadership role, separate from the governmental leadership that is now provided by the 37 year-old Jagdeo.

Prior to the start of the two-day congress in the Corentyne region, a party stronghold, delegates from at least two party groups had circulated motions calling for constitutional changes to end what was perceived as a leadership structure rooted in the PPP’s history as a Marxist-Leninist party, although it functions on the basis of a democratic socialist entity.

However, while electing President Jagdeo above all other candidates for the powerful 35-member decision-making Central Committee, the delegates overwhelmingly rejected proposals to erase references to Marxism and Socialism from its constitution and to have direct elections for a leader and a chairman.

This means that the party’s structure will remain what it was right up to the time of the death in March 1997 of its legendary founder-leader, the late Dr Cheddi Jagan, who held the post of general secretary but, unlike the current holder, Ramotar, was automatically regarded as leader, even while he was also president of Guyana.

This situation continued when his widow, Janet Jagan, who missed congress for the first time in the party’s history due to illness, was president of Guyana and the general secretary post was held by Ramotar, making a break with governmental leadership and that of the PPP.

The 35-member Central Committee, on which Mrs Jagan has retained her seat along with some of the leading figures of the PPP, will meet shortly to elect a 15-member Executive Committee.

President Jagdeo, armed with a vote of confidence from the Congress of “loyalty to the party” and support for government’s policies under his leadership, took the opportunity to reaffirm his stand in favour of dialogue with the opposition parties and civil society to encourage wider participation in the governance of Guyana.

He called on Opposition Leader Desmond Hoyte, whose People’s National Congress holds its Biennial Congress next month, to cease the “politics of destabilisation” and resume with him the process of dialogue to resolve outstanding issues of differences.