Editorial | Accept Integrity Commission’s recommendations

Prime Minister Andrew Holness should accept, and move quickly to implement, the recommendations of the Integrity Commission (IC) for a tightening of the laws and regulations against conflicts of interest, nepotism and cronyism by public officials, including government ministers.

However, the Government shouldn’t await a formal or legislative review before launching a campaign to sensitise public officials, including the permanent bureaucracy, of their fiduciary obligations to taxpayers, over whose resources they have management and control. Indeed, this is within the mandate of the IC.

At the same time, Prime Minister Holness has an opportunity to display his new, politically liberated self, which recently was the case, by acting swiftly and firmly on these matters. The Office of the Prime Minister (OPM) must no longer be seen as the place where offenders find refuge or are kept under scrutiny.

This matter has new and greater currency in the wake of separate investigative reports by the Integrity Commission into the conduct of two government ministers, Karl Samuda and J.C. Hutchinson, which highlight how public officials can be lax, indulgent, and insufficiently reflective or have a sense of entitlement.

At the time of the issues for which he was investigated, Mr Samuda, the minister of labour and social security, had responsibility for industry and agriculture. Mr Hutchinson was in the same ministry. His issues, though, relate to his conduct as a member of parliament for North Western St Elizabeth.

The Jamaica Dairy Development Board (JDDB), as part of its effort to revitalise the sector, encouraged dairy farmers to plant mombasa grass, which was said to be better pasture for their cows. In April 2016, three months after Mr Samuda’s party returned to office, Byron Lawrence, the then chief technical director at the dairy board and coordinator of the project, ostensibly entered a verbal agreement with Mr Samuda to plant a demonstration plot of mombasa grass on the minister’s dairy farm at Knollis, St Catherine.

Mr Samuda said he initially demurred before accepting. He offered to pay. By the minister’s account, corroborated by Mr Lawrence, he prevailed upon to accept the arrangement because of its potential demonstration effect and the fact it was a service that the dairy board provided to farmers.

PUBLIC SCANDAL

However, what was initially to have been a five-acre demonstration plot soon increased to 15 acres. And it was intended that it would go to 35 acres when the JDDB’s CEO, Hugh Graham, discovered the expansion and pulled the plug. In fact, 14.2 acres were planted. A year later, when the matter became a public scandal, Mr Samuda reimbursed the dairy board J$546,000 and acknowledged “an error on my part not to have safeguarded myself appropriately”.

The Integrity Commission discovered, though, that even after Mr Graham’s order to end the planting on Mr Samuda’s farm, the project continued – apparently at the directive of Mr Lawrence, who subsequently became CEO of the JDDB. The J$546,000 paid by Mr Samuda didn’t include at least another J$188,000 for additional ploughing, or the cost of seeds used on the minister’s farm – a decision strongly defended by Mr Lawrence. His reason: “I just couldn’t justify that”.

“.. We have never assessed anybody for seeds and secondly, if we were to put the seeds in this, you are talking about somewhere in the region of almost $700,000 for 14 acres,” Mr Lawrence told the IC. “How do you reconcile that?”

Mr Lawrence, it appears, assumed that his wish to ease the financial burden on the minister – who had acknowledged error and had agreed to pay – carried greater weight than his fiduciary responsibility to Jamaica’s taxpayers, to whom he owed a duty of care.

KNOWN BETTER

While we appreciate Mr Samuda’s acceptance that he erred, he, from the start, should have known better than allow himself to be “prevailed upon” to accept Mr Lawrence’s offer, especially in the face of his own misgivings about this kind of involvement in the project. The Integrity Commission’s recommendation that “ministers of government be instructed to desist from accepting personal benefits from programmes implemented by agencies for which they have ministerial responsibility or otherwise” should help to reduce, if not eliminate, such displays of poor judgement.

It would also serve as a reminder that, as the IC said, “the acceptance of such benefits creates an actual conflict of interest which undermines public trust in the fair and objective operation of agencies of the government”. This is indeed significant when upwards of 70 per cent of Jamaicans perceive their country to be corrupt and over half of the population have a similar view of the majority of legislators. Most other national institutions face similar perceptions.

Beyond the Samuda matter, the public trust in these institutions is likely to be further rocked – or people may just have become more cynical – by the Integrity Commission’s conclusions about the behaviour of Mr Hutchinson. Essentially, it found that he engaged in conflicts of interests and nepotism in his role as MP.

Just two years ago, Mr Hutchinson was at the centre of a scandal over his use of his office to cause the Sugar Company of Jamaica Holdings to lease 2,400 acres of land to a company in which his life partner, Lola Marshall-Williams, was a primary shareholder. Her business partner in the venture was a senior manager of a farmers support agency, the Rural Agricultural Development Authority, for which Mr Hutchinson had oversight. Ms Marshall-Williams also sat on the RADA parish board for St Elizabeth.

For these indiscretions Mr Hutchinson was transferred to the OPM.

In the latest case, the Integrity Commission determined that Mr Hutchinson engineered Ms Marshall-Williams’ appointment to the boards of five public-funded schools in his constituency “on at least eleven (11) occasions, despite multiple documented objections from other stakeholders, including the Ministry of Education’s regional director and the principal of one such institution”.

The MP’s action, the commission said, amounted “to nepotism and constituted an actual conflict of interest”. Further, in 2018 Mr Hutchinson, through an assistant, caused a company owned by his and Ms Marshall-Williams’ son to be recommended for over J$700,000 worth of contracts, which were to be paid for out of the J$20 million each allocated to MPs for projects in their constituencies.

Whatever administrative or political sanctions may be contemplated against Mr Hutchinson – or Mr Samuda – it is obvious that there is urgent need for a review of the rules to close the loopholes into which offenders habitually crawl.