THE Constituency Development Fund (CDF) is, without doubt, the parliamentarians’ favourite first 100-day initiative from the current administration.

The fund, which provides MPs with access to financing for various projects in their constituencies, has been welcomed by both sides of the House since inception even though it has fallen well short of the 2.5 per cent of the budget that the JLP had promised in its 2007 electioneering.

But after announcing that the first tranche of $8 million for each constituency was paid out in July and that a second tranche of $12 million per constituency was coming, Prime Minister Bruce Golding last Tuesday warned the MPs to ensure against corruption, nepotism and victimisation.

“I am appealing to members of parliament, let us make sure that we build this programme, and build it so that it can be an example of public probity and accountability in the discharge and in the expenditure of public funds,” he said.

The prime minister was responding to a question from Opposition MP Ronnie Thwaites, who described the CDF as a “very good programme”. “This is a programme that was not universally welcomed,” Golding stated.

“There were many critics of the programme, and I am urging members of parliament to take particular care in your oversight functions to ensure that the procedures are followed (and) that value is obtained for every dollar of expenditure. It will not take much for the programme to come under attack. There is a view held by some people in the country, that members of parliament must simply be leaders of delegations and submitters of representation. To whom?

“I have always argued that when the people in my constituency went to vote, my name was the one on the ballot to which the majority responded. There is no minister in this house, whose name was on that ballot. And, therefore, my function as member of parliament can’t be to take a message to the minister, because my constituency can’t hold that minister accountable.

“I am the only one that they can hold accountable, and it is not going to be effective accountability if all that I can do is make representations. Because, all I have to say to them is, look at the letters I have written, look at the phone calls I have made, I have made representations on your behalf.

“The intention of the programme was not to empower members of parliament, but to empower the people who elected them. That through their representatives there could be a responsiveness to their needs. And, because I believe that that purpose is so important, and that mandate is so critical, we have to nurse, protect and guard this programme from corruption, from nepotism, from victimisation, from partisan manipulation. Because, if it succumbs to that, then we are going to go back to the old system and, perhaps, when we go back not even what we used to get under SESP will be available, because the whole process would have been discredited,” Golding said.

Thwaites said that those who criticise the programme did so without reference to the fact that there is no replete social safety net in the country.

“I urge the prime minister to issue that rejoinder whenever he or indeed anyone of us, face that kind of very trite and shallow criticism of the important representational role,” Thwaites said.

Golding responded that it was not only journalists who were “uncomfortable” with the programme.

“If the truth be told, the persons who are uncomfortable with the programme, the persons who don’t like the programme are not confined to persons who write editorials in newspapers,” he said.

“There are others who are uncomfortable with the programme and, therefore, endeavours have been engaged not just to dot the ‘Is’ and to cross the ‘Ts’, but to dot the ‘Is’ two times and to cross the ‘Ts’ two times, and to ensure that the ‘I’ is properly dotted and the “T” is well crossed. That is perhaps something that we have to live with.”