HONESTY IS A LONELY WORD

Feb 02, 2020 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Any political system which has to rely on the integrity of its personnel to ensure its effectiveness is doomed to failure. Integrity and effectiveness are not the same.
For centuries, thinkers have philosophised about the ideal political system. The great political philosophers have sought to propose the ideal political state and the manner in which power should be structured and used. They have never sought to offer that the best government is the one which is headed by someone who is honest or has integrity. Integrity and honesty have been treated as personal character traits, part of the virtuous leader, but not an essential requirement of a just political system.
Over time, the assumption has been that governments should be subject to a system of checks and balances to ensure that it is not run by corrupt individuals. This is evident today in the United States, where a sitting President is being subjected to an impeachment hearing over allegations that he attempted to use his political office for personal political gain.
Impeachment procedures are not moral inquisitions. They are imperfect but practical mechanisms intended to ensure that sitting Presidents understand, whether they are impeached or not, that their actions are subject to oversight, judicial as well as political, and that they will be held accountable for their actions
The idea, therefore, that a country’s populace must actively seek out honest leaders, is alien to political theory. The British have their no-confidence motions and the concept of political responsibility. The Americans have their system of checks and balances, including the threat of impeachment.
Democratic oversight and checks and balances have, however, failed to curtail the excesses of corruption in high political office. Political corruption, in fact, has thrived in the face of the very systems, which have been put in place to limit. There is therefore a search for new solutions to the problem of political corruption.
The solution is not to find the honest leader. Rather, it is to check his or her powers through constitutional and other legal restraints. With the right restraints, it is felt that is possible to tame even a rascal.
It has come to pass; however, that politicians have found ways around constitutional restraints. They can simply ignore, bypass or flout them. As such, a second round of solutions emerged. This involves institutions to check, oversee and prosecute public officials.
There however is a downside to these watchdog institutions. Who will watch the watchdog? We have seen in countries such as Brazil, where institutions with oversight duties have been used to hound politicians out of office.
Therefore, the search for an answer to corruption remains and the answer is to be found in ideology, the ideology of the shrinking government. The idea is that with a smaller government, there will be less corruption to worry about. With a smaller government, it will be easier to manage corruption.
The government, however, is moving in the opposite direction. It is enlarging the state. It is creating more and more bureaucracy, and unnecessary committees and commissions which not only act as a drain on the public purse, but which have been ineffective in fighting corruption.
What Guyana needs is smaller government, more technically committed and less bureaucratic. With bureaucracy comes red tape, and this red tape is used to frustrate people into paying bribes. With a larger role for government comes the need for more contracts to be issued. And with more contracts come corruption.
There is a need for a serious downsizing of government. The government has become an albatross around the necks of the people. In order to finance an enlarged government, taxes have to be increased. Taxes have increased, and this has been taking billions of dollars out of disposable income, which is necessary to stimulate the economy.
The bureaucracy is adding further burdens to the population. The government is bloated, and it is bloated with a great host of incompetents, many of whom got their jobs not on merit, but based on connections, while we have bright students who have left school with good passes, being unable to even be granted an interview for a government.
The government needs to be shrunk to reduce corruption. This is the solution to corruption, not honesty and integrity in leadership.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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