Right about now at the Parish Hall, the Belize Council of Churches and the University of the West Indies are holding a public forum to examine the issue of corruption and its impact on churches and the country on a whole. It's important because Transparency International's latest report on corruption says that 5 of every six countries in the region have serious levels of corruption. Costs to countries are anywhere between 5% and 27% of GDP. Those are serious considerations and that's what special guest speaker at the forum Professor Neville Duncan will speak about. He says that stamping out corruption is everyone's responsibility.
Neville Duncan, Professor
"There is corruption everywhere and part of the whole idea behind any good governance arrangement is to reduce it because the consequences are really costly for a country. It reduces equitable distribution of wealth, it does it unfairly; it prevents economic growth, it discourages the right kind of foreign investors to come into a country. The consequences are far too negative for us to tolerate it for much longer. It is pervasive. In our personal lives we behave in corrupt ways. We therefore tolerate it at another level and so we tolerate it in government, we tolerate it in the churches, in the schools, in the public bureaucracies of the country, the civil service and so on because some of us get around things like that basically we need to change that attitude from the personal level right through to the top."
Rev. Moises Chan, Council of Churches
"Even within our individual churches we need to talk to each other, to say how can we support each other, how can we do what is right; basically doing the right thing. Sometimes we get used to doing things one way and we ignore, we sideline, some issues that we need to do. As we study the Bible, we find out that the Bible says that throughout the history of the Christian church, even in the Old Testament there has been corruption in the church sometimes. The intention is that we ourselves need to look at ourselves, what are we doing or not doing."
The forum is at the Parish Hall tonight and began at 7.
