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Corruption festered by low Public Servants morale – Granger
Leader of A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) David Granger has expressed that corruption within government agencies is being festered by the low morale that Public Servants face in respect to how they are paid, especially against the backdrop of the seemingly flourishing drug trade and other elicit activities where that money can be used to influence government officials.
The Opposition Leader in an interview with Kaieteur News said that drug trafficking is the mother of all crimes, “it is insidious, it’s dangerous and it peculates into every area of governmental activity because of the value of the drug trade. So revenue officers, police officers and enforcement officers who are working for $50,000 and $60,000 a month are at the mercy of narco traffickers who can just say look take this $600,000 and buy some sweets for the kids.”
Leader of APNU David Granger
He said that most persons are generally weak and susceptible to bribery and mentioned that APNU made recommendations for making structured provisions to address that.
“You can’t eliminate corruption completely but we can reduce it by having properly trained, paid and supervised officers. That is the root of corruption. It takes two but if you have a magistrate or a civil servant who is capable of resisting somebody who is trying to bribe him or her, we then will start to turn the tide,” said Granger.
“I remember somebody was arrested for smuggling fuel and the person approached the Coast Guard officer and the officer reported him to the police for attempting to bribe him. So once people are comfortable in their own skin, in their rank, in their positions, they are comfortable with their salaries, it would be difficult for corruption to thrive.”
The Opposition Leader expressed that for governmental corruption to take place regardless of what form it might be manifested in, it would mean that a public servant has turned a blind eye or failed to exercise diligent supervision. “I am not accusing the public servants but sometimes people are paid not to only look away but to do nothing. You may be a sentry at a position and the man tells you just go to the washroom between half past eleven and half past twelve tonight, that’s all, you don’t have to do anything you don’t have to touch anything, just go to the washroom because you have a bad stomach and at the end you have $500 000.”
Granger explained that corruption can take place in many forms but as far a governmental corruption is concerned, much of it “occurs because of the low morale in the Guyana Public Service and that is related directly to the way the People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPP/C) administration has been treating the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU) since 1999, failing to negotiate in good faith, failing to grant public servants a good wage and reducing them to the level of poverty.”
He said that is why APNU came out in support of the public servants “because we have to clean up the public service, but a lot of the easy money comes from the narco trafficking, money laundering, gun running and other illicit activities, if we stamp those out we would be on the way to making Guyana a lawful, law abiding state.”
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