Lobbying or Bribing?

Oct 21, 2011 Editorial

As democracy develops in Guyana under a free-enterprise economic regime, there have been some very unwelcome developments that this newspaper, for one, has been at pains to highlight. We refer to the numerous instances of governmental spending – consummated or prospective – where the evidence suggests that officials are conniving with contractors and other suppliers of goods and services to deny value for money from the public purse. To be blunt, that there is corruption of public officials.
We have looked at this phenomenon several times over the past few years, from various angles. On this occasion we want to look ahead somewhat. If we examine the development of all the now acknowledged “democracies”, we would note that in their early phase, political democracy did not always move in step with economic democracy.
In the US, there were of course, the “robber barons”, in Japan the favoured and incestuous corporations of MITI and in South Korea the Chaebols, all of which accumulated wealth in quantities and by methods that would certainly raise eyebrows today. Buying and selling political offices also reflected a more free-wheeling atmosphere, but as their economies developed, so did the demands for more democratic and ‘fair” methods to influence public spending and public policies.
In the three countries mentioned, it must be pointed out there was never the assumption that governmental officers ought to be left in sequestered solitude to run the affairs of state. This is especially true when it came to public spending. It is now accepted that public policy – despite being formulated, legitimated and enforced by governmental institutions – is “enriched and refined “by input from a medley of interest, pressure and civil society groups. And so we arrived at groups of “lobbyists” that are paid to convince the government officials that the cause of their clients – generally businesses – are for the “good of the country”. Is this not introducing corruption through the front door?
We are raising this point because as the present campaign unfolds, we are not witnessing a healthy debate on the question of corruption. From the governmental side, the best we have heard is that while there is corruption, it is not at a scale or level as is being trumpeted by the opposition. Unfortunately, the opposition has also been very stereotypical in its reaction to corruption: merely looking at it as a club to beat the government over the head with. They all promise to do better.
This is not good enough. We are introducing the notion that even if we were to curb the very open and crude bribery of public officials through methods such as those outlined in our editorials of the Hong Kong success stories, we still have to deal with the sophisticated “Group Theory of Public Policy”, for instance, that holds sway in the “advanced democracies”. This theory views policymakers as reacting perpetually to pressures emanating from various interest groups and lobbyists, bargaining and negotiating their way to a policy that agglutinates a broad range of interests. The question then arises: “How different is this from the present open bribery that is evidently the norm at the beginning of the development trajectory?”
Central to that theory is the concept of power: which of the groups will command more influence and power in public policymaking. Looking ahead, even without any mercenary motives, we can see that groups may enter the policymaking process by making themselves indispensable to governments in public policy areas in which governmental expertise is either lacking or not up to the mark. This is most likely to happen in poor countries where governmental expertise in a whole range of policy issues is lacking due to either budgetary constraints or bureaucratic lethargy.
The downside of too much reliance on outside expertise is the ever-present fear of what is called ‘interest group capture’ of a policy field. We saw this in the US when the government became captive to the neo-cons such as in the Heritage Foundation.
As we work to improve our governance, we must be careful not to jump from the frying pan into the fire.

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