Editorial | Signing code of conduct an important symbol

It is difficult to understand why neither Prime Minister Andrew Holness nor Mark Golding, the opposition leader, has formally announced their assent to the leaders’ code of conduct proposed by the Integrity Commission (IC) or explain their delay or reluctance in signing it.

Perhaps they perceive the document as meaningless symbolism that will yield little. Or it may be – which this newspaper prefers to believe – a case that Messrs Holness and Golding are awaiting the appropriate occasion to jointly sign the code – with much fanfare, to signal the launch of an assault on corruption and the revival of stalled efforts to re-engineer and reshape their parties – the old gangs of Gordon House.

In that case, as the National Integrity Action, the good governance campaigners, suggested last week, the upcoming Vale Royal summit between the political leaders would be a good occasion for the signing.

It should happen before the start of the talks and be done with Jamaica as witness. For the signing should represent not only individual pledges of appropriate behaviour by Mr Holness, but declarations of intent to hold the Government, Parliament and their parties accountable.

Put another way, the leaders should treat the signing as a kind of New Year resolution – that is, a statement that 2023 is the year when Jamaica begins to go for broke against corruption.

VALE ROYAL TALKS

Prime Minister Holness has indicated that he expects the resurrected Vale Royal talks – the periodic sessions at which the government and the opposition seeks to find consensus on critical policy issues – to be primarily about crime, aimed especially at coaxing Mr Golding’s People’s National Party (PNP) to embrace of the use of states of emergency as its key crime-fighting tool. Mr Holness believes that Jamaica’s murder count – 1,498 last year – justifies the infringement of constitutional rights.

However, solving the crisis of homicides and gang-related crime isn’t removed from tackling white collar corruption, or the need for a deeper and sustained overhaul of the island’s political parties – Mr Golding’s PNP and Mr Holness’ Jamaica Labour Party (JLP). Indeed, there is a residual thread between lingering elements of Jamaica’s political culture and the environment that spawns much of the island’s violent crime.

But there are hurdles to scale.

Jamaicans, largely, do not trust their leaders and the institutions of the state. Consistently, over half, and up to nearly 80 per cent of Jamaicans say the government is corrupt or that they live in a corrupt country. More than four in 10 say that legislators are corrupt while nearly a fifth have that view of the judiciary. A half don’t trust the police. Large swathes of Jamaicans, most studies show, also don’t believe that the government is aggressive enough in dealing with corruption, despite the existence of a raft of anti-corruption agencies.

These views coalesce in Jamaica’s mid range ranking in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, with a score of 44, a count that places it among countries with a serious corruption problem.

The cynical attitudes Jamaicans have towards institutions of leadership are not without reason. It is notoriously so that political parties played outsized roles in the creation of so-called garrison communities, areas where political support is almost exclusively for one political party from which the activities of opponents were excluded. The party’s support used to be maintained by strong-arm types who were sustained by the patronage of politicians – or the state when their side held power.

RESIDUAL LINK

The direct corralling of votes might have corroded, with some of the old institutional enforcers morphing into independent gangs. But a residual link between crime and politics remains. Garrison communities still exist. And there is no sign that the political parties feel any urgency to fully dismantle the legacy arrangements from which they still benefit.

It is, however, not only obviously gun-wielding thugs who gain from an environment where too many people don’t play according to the formal rules.

Last month, Keith Duncan, the CEO of the JMMB banking group and recently president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica, estimated that crime and corruption cost Jamaica between five and 10 per cent of its gross domestic product annually, or J$100 billion to J$200 billion a year. He didn’t believe that the island as yet had much to show for its investment in its anti-corruption infrastructure, or that sufficient attention was being paid to powerful, white collar criminals.

We agree!

However, countries with the greatest success in reversing corruption – which are also the ones that tend to have the lowest rates of crime – are those with strong moral leadership, in the broadest sense of that concept.

Their institutions are wholly intolerant of corrupt behaviour. People in charge are held robustly to account. Which is where this newspaper – and the majority of citizens – want Jamaica to be.

That starts with political leadership. Those at the helm must ensure that the organisations they use to attain power meet a high moral bar. And the leaders must, in both symbol and action, hold themselves accountable.

That is why Mr Holness and Mr Golding should sign the IC’s code, which is almost identical to the document that the former prime minister, P.J. Patterson, set out in 2002 for ministers to follow.