Government and the opposition need to sign codes of conduct

Jul 05, 2012 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News is not looking for any awards. But God knows, the contribution of this newspaper over the past year in exposing wrongdoing in government has far surpassed the efforts of the opposition parties combined since 1992.
What Glenn Lall and Adam Harris have achieved in the past year alone, the opposition parties have not been able to match for twenty years. This is simply phenomenal. Kaieteur News has been brave, courageous and outstanding.
The force behind these efforts has been its publisher Glenn Lall. And it would be true to say that it is only because of his fearlessness that this newspaper has become a crusader against corruption within our society and particularly within government. No other paper comes near; no other political party compares and one has to ask what have these parties been doing in this country all this time and why have they not been able to expose corruption like Glenn Lall and Adam Harris have been able to do.
This is not the first time that corruption has become a national concern. And it will not be the last time. Corruption has always been a sore point.
It was Walter Rodney who highlighted the link between corruption at the official level and the corruption within the rest of the society. That assessment is still relevant today and this is why something needs to be done and done quickly to restore greater public confidence in the work of the government.
It is no longer just the case of the government identifying new scapegoats to show the rest of the country that they are serious about corruption. The public is not going to be satisfied with half measures. They are not going to be content with anything short of a serious attempt at restoring public confidence in the work of the administration.
And this is something that Donald Ramotar has to understand. It matters not whether he thinks there is pervasive corruption within the government. What matters is that the populace out there feels that things have gone too far and that it is time that the government be revamped to give it a cleaner image.
The first step in that process is the government to demonstrate that it does not need to be pushed before it acts. Too often it is the case in the past that unless the government’s back was against the wall, they did very little about corruption.
No one expects the government to go on a witch-hunt. But certainly, it needs to take steps to ensure that the public is satisfied with the steps they are taking to root out official corruption and particularly, corruption at the very top.
One way of doing this, would be to ask all Ministers of the government to subscribe to a code of conduct in so far as corruption is concerned. This code can be extended to situations in which the personal interests of ministers may conflict with their professional responsibilities.
Many persons are going to be cynical about such a suggestion because they will argue that swearing or signing a piece of paper without any legal enforceability amounts to window dressing and means little.
A code of conduct for Government Ministers means a great deal. Foremost it means that the Ministers of the government are giving their word publicly to act in a certain way and if they fall short of these standards, then there is a basis on which the President can fire them.
People have been calling on our elected Presidents to fire Ministers for a long time but they have never had at their disposal a sworn code of conduct to press their case. If however, Ministers of the government are obligated to swear to a code of conduct, there will be at the disposal of the public, such an instrument.
The opposition parliamentarians should also devise their own code of conduct. They are at present developing all manner of irrelevant motions and draft Bills, so there should be no lack of skill in developing a code of conduct to guide their own actions inside and outside of parliament.
The code for these opposition parliamentarians needs to insist that they will not use their positions as either politicians or parliamentarians for personal gain.
But more importantly, the code should incorporate provisions that would deal with the issue of their professional interests conflicting with their responsibilities as parliamentarian. It should, for example, make provisions as to how opposition parliamentarians should deal with conflicts of interest and potential conflicts of interest, especially as these relate to instances where their professional interests influence how they vote on matters before the National Assembly or the position that their parties take inside and outside of parliament.
The opposition will find itself with a credibility problem if when criticizing the government of ignoring possible conflicts of interest, the opposition itself is found to be guilty of the same thing. And so they too need to sign their own codes of conduct
Kaieteur News can only expose and condemn. It is not its job to bring public pressure on any party, be it the ruling party or an opposition party. It is for those parties to press for changes through a code of conduct for Ministers and parliamentarians. This would be a good beginning.

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