Guyana’s 1997 Integrity Commission Act sought to make provisions for the purpose of ‘securing the integrity of those in public life’. In 2023, The Corruption Perception Index (CPI) reported that ‘While some countries have improved their corruption levels, most are stagnating or declining as leaders fail to act’. The CPI ranks 180 countries and territories on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). Over two-thirds of countries scored below 50 out of 100, which strongly indicated that they have serious problems with corruption. In 2023, the global average was only 43 and Guyana scored 40.
Only two countries in the Americas have improved their scores in the last decade; Dominican Republic and Guyana, and in the latter that improvement occurred in the period of Coalition rule: moving from 29 to 41 between 2015 and 2020. Corruption in Guyana had stagnated under PPP rule: 28 in 2012 to 29 in 2015 and 41 in 2020 to 40 in 2023 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/811548/guyana-corruption-perception-index/).
Not surprisingly, a few weeks ago, Guyana came under withering criticism at the recently concluded United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) meeting for not effectively dealing with public corruption in the highest reaches of the government, the police, the public sector., etc. A cursory content analysis of the daily newspapers will show that almost every day, coming from the official opposition and elsewhere, there are complaints about the level of public corruption.
In this context, imagine how alarmed I was when I came upon Mr. Sherwood Lowe’s suggestion that would permanently defang the Integrity Commission (KN: 10/04/2024). My concern arose not merely from the fact of his recommendation but from my awareness that he has recently been appointed an official opposition representative on the newly established Constitutional Reform Commission.
According to him, the IC ‘is both badly mis-purposed and a crass violator of privacy and comfort rights of public officials and their families’! He then suggested that it would be more useful to focus ‘exclusively on detecting and preventing conflicts of interest in the public service’ whatever this entails!
Annual reporting under the act focuses upon specified high offices and before one is given such an office one should, financially and otherwise, be seriously vetted, after which annual reporting should be a walk in the park. There also appears to be a five-year termination threshold.
Lowe claimed that ‘most of [the IC’s] statutory functions are redundant and unnecessary’ for they are already done by other institutions: the GRA and the Ombudsman. Most if not all democratic countries that have an IC also have GRA and ombudsman-type organisations and this kind of universality alone should have made one ponder whether it made sense to target the national structural arrangement instead of the specific institution that he complained, rightly in my opinion, is too ‘docile.’
The focuses of an IC, GRA and ombudsman are completely different and require different skill sets. For example, tax collectors focus upon what your records say, or should say, about how much you earn, etc., not upon how much of what you say you earn or should pay resulted from ill-gotten gains. The ombudsman is an institution that is supposed to address and resolve citizens’ complaints of poor service etc. in a timely manner.
Lest we succumb to misadventure, let us look at what happened in Australia. In 2019, the attorney general of Australia announced that the government intended to bring legislation to establish a national integrity commission and the non-profit Centre for Public Integrity, which conducts research into preventing corruption, compared the draft bill with other models and gave a useful insight into the operations of what a modern IC.
The Centre argued that an IC should have the ‘remit and powers necessary to investigate allegations of misconduct involving federal parliamentarians or the public service, have a broad jurisdiction and strong investigative powers including the ability to hold public hearings. Its jurisdiction should include the public sector and members of parliament, third parties who corruptly influence the public sector and any conduct affecting impartial decision-making. It should be able to begin investigations without threshold of evidence’.
It went on that the IC should be able to accept referrals from other agencies, receive complaints from any person and in any known or unknown form, including anonymous complaints. It should have investigative powers to compel witnesses and the production of documents, search public premises without application to a judicial officer, use warranted surveillance powers and have public hearings. In terms of reporting, the IC should be able to make findings of fact (not findings of guilt) in respect of criminal or disciplinary offences and report publicly.
It concluded that the strongest and most effective integrity commissions had:
- The ability to investigate any conduct of any person that affects the impartial exercise of public administration. This allows investigation of those outside the public service who seek to unduly influence public decision-making and does not limit investigations to criminal conduct.
- The ability to begin investigations without satisfying a threshold of evidence.
- The ability to hold public hearings if in the public interest and to make findings and report publicly.
Most importantly, the Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission established under the legislation is an independent body, meaning that the government is ‘not able to tell it what to investigate, or how to do its job’. A parliamentary joint committee consisting of 3 members from the government, 2 from the opposition and one from neither the government nor opposition have oversight and appointment responsibilities.
In Guyana, the law that governs the commission gives the president almost total control over the body. For a start, it gives the president of an ethnic party almost total control over appointing the commission: s/he needs only to ‘consult’ with the leader of the opposition in regard to the chairperson. When today the presidency itself is suspect, this suggests that the docility Mr. Lowe detected may well have more to do with structural deficiencies and political will.
Put simply, any suggestion that IC-type work should be transferred to a government department of any kind should be totally rejected. What exists should not be equated with what ought to exist and given Guyana’s social environment, serious reforms that make the body more independent and technically appropriate are more worthy of recommendation and I hope that Mr. Lowe will use his recent appointment to advocate for these.
