And while the fleecing of the Treasury is one thing, the under-deposits at City Hall is another and then there’s the border management’s missing deposits, and then the KMHM disaster. Put together, it has meaningfully undermined the anti-corruption platform that the Barrow administration was elected on. Yesterday Prime Minister Barrow told me that it does reflect poorly on his government, but for him, the most important thing is that a higher, more punitive standard remains in effect for elected officials.
Jacqueline Godwin,
“What does your administration plan to do to win back some of the credibility that obviously has been lost?”
Hon. Dean Barrow, Prime Minister
“We have to make a distinction between acts of dishonesty or corruption that take place at the level of political appointees and those that take place at the level of regular public officer. In a sense you can’t blame the government for public officers being corrupt, being in fact dishonest. If the government doesn’t try as much as possible to look at the systems that are in place to try and discover whether as I said lapses or porous or terribly imperfect systems didn’t contribute to what has happened in terms of public officers making off with money. If we don’t do that then something is wrong and we will do that but there will always be, in every country, in ever public system there will be acts of dishonesty and so while we have to look at the systems I am more concerned about the acts of dishonesty that can be laid squarely at the door of politically elected or politically appointed persons.
So far the only serious incident that has happened is at the KHMH and of course we put in place the Commission of Inquiry. I will have to try to ensure that we appoint to these statutory bodies, and we produce as candidates for municipal office only people of the highest integrity but so often you don’t know that people are not as honest as you think they are until after the fact. What I can continue to say with every assurance is that while I might not be able to stop acts of corruption from taking place, as soon as these things are discovered, I will ensure that we come down on the guilty parties, on the suspected parties like a ton of bricks. The full weight of the law must be brought to bear on all those that are accused of engaging in acts of corruption, especially those that are politically appointed or politically elected.”
Jacqueline Godwin,
“You don’t know what toll this is taking on you but it seems that whenever there is an allegation of misappropriation of funds, it looks like you have to jump in and micromanage everything. Is there nobody else who will be able to get this job done?”
Hon. Dean Barrow,
“Well the fact is that I have a particular interest because my credibility is also on the line. I was the one that got out there and said to people that I wouldn’t tolerate corruption so I believe that whatever toll it takes, I have an obligation now to be seen by the people as getting involved the moment this thing rears its head and making every effort to try to deal with it. To the extent that your question makes the point that it takes away from other duties and other things that I ought to be doing, your perfectly correct but for me this is of such paramount importance that I will insist on getting involved in terms of ensuring that the law takes its course when and if these things happen.”
At this time, four investigations and audits into missing funds or misspent are underway at one government departments a municipal body and two statutory authorities.
