Editorial | No joy in corruption index

If there is a positive take away for Jamaica from Transparency International (TI) latest Perception Corruption Perception Index (CPI), published this week, is that nothing has changed. Jamaica’s situation hasn’t worsened.

The island still ranks as the 73rd least corrupt country among the 182 measured by TI. Its CPI score remains stubbornly at 44 out of a possible 100, exactly where it has stood since 2020. And therein lies the rub.

For even more than its rank, a country’s CPI score – arrived at from a matrix that includes financial disclosure rules for public officials, the prevalence of bribery, diversion of state funds, public sector nepotism and the management of conflicts of interest – is what is crucial. It is what really speaks about its level of corruption, or people’s perception thereof.

With a score of 44, Jamaica sits just above the global average, 42, but remains in the bottom half of the acceptable range. It is therefore among the countries perceived to have a significant problem with corruption.

On that score, Jamaica has stagnated over the past half of a decade, after its advances over the previous eight years. Between 2012 (when it ranked 83 among 176 countries) and 2020, when it attained its current grade, the island lifted its CPI score six points, moving from 38 to 44. That was largely on the back of the raft of new anti-corruption legislation, and in particular the 2018 launch of the Integrity Commission (IC).

PERSISTENT ASSAULTS ON THE IC

In recent years, though, there has been cause to question, despite its declarations to the contrary, the firmness of the government’s commitment to anti-corruption rules, as well as the robustness with which these are intended to be enforced.

The most obvious area of public concern has been persistent assaults by government legislators, in Parliament and parliamentary committees, on the IC over their disaffection with how the commission has gone about its work, including its probe of the finances of Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness.

In addition, at hearings of a joint parliamentary committee reviewing the Integrity Commission Act, government members floated amendments that would weaken the IC. These include giving politicians, under the guise of parliamentary oversight, greater control over its operations.

There have also been undermining criticisms in parliamentary committees against the auditor general (AuG) because of that office’s frequent adverse findings, in regular and special audits, of government ministries and their agencies, especially with respect to breaches of procurement rules.

The latest of these was the auditor general’s criticism of energy and communications minister, Daryl Vaz, for overriding the rules, bypassing the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management, by ordering the purchase of Starlink satellite communications devices, in the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa. Mr Vaz’s argument was that he acted in an emergency and insisted he would do it again in similar circumstances.

Recently, too, before the Vaz/ODPEM matter, was the AuG’s audit of the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI), which unearthed widescale breaches of procurement regulations, including after-the-fact paper work, and utilising the hospital’s tax-exempt status to facilitate duty-free imports for private firms that had contacts with the institution.

There is the sense that when rules and regulations are breached, no one is held to account. Usually by omission rather than active commission.

FAILURE OF COMMITMENT

Another concern, from a policy standpoint, is the government’s retreat from its undertaking to pass legislation for judges to issue unexplained wealth orders (UWO), forcing people with wealth beyond their known or obvious sources of income, to explain how they came by it. The administration said that this would likely conflict with people’s constitutional right to a presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law.

It is of significant note that Jamaica’s CPI score lags behind most of its Caribbean Community member countries, with similar governmental systems and stages of development. So, it is not a matter of development, but fundamentally a failure of commitment.

As Transparency International observed in its latest report: “ Countries with long-term improvements in CPI scores have largely sustained efforts to implement legal and institutional reform.” In other words, the anti-corruption process is not an event. It is continuous work.

But metrics like the CPI index matter. They fundamentally reflect how citizens perceive their countries and how the people they entrust with government and governance, manage their affairs. In that event, Jamaicans find their government and the public bureaucracy wanting.

The Corruption Perception Index, and similar instruments, also help to inform potential investors’ views of countries as places to do business.

Or, as we put it a year ago, they contribute, in the cases of the least corrupt, to a country’s comparative advantage.