Peter Espeut | Foxes and henhouses

Why don’t we let bank robbers regulate themselves? Better yet, why don’t we put bank robbers in charge of the department of the police force which regulates crime? Aren’t foxes the best group to put in charge of henhouses? They know how good the chicken taste!

And while we are at it, why don’t we put the bauxite industry in charge of environmental protection, the tobacco companies in charge of health regulation, and taxi drivers in charge of the Island Traffic Authority? After all, doesn’t the business sector have the right to protect their own investments, their own interests? We must promote stakeholder management, which will lead to growth in profits and an increase in our nation’s GDP!

Now that we are on a roll, why don’t we give politicians the power to set their own salaries? Why don’t we give parliamentarians the power to make the rules for regulating political corruption? They are the ones who know all about it!

And why don’t we put politicians in charge of overseeing the work of the Integrity Commission? Remember, you elect your leaders to manage the affairs of the country. Politicians have a right to know and control how effective every department of government performs. We are only doing our jobs!

And if – God forbid! – the Integrity Commission should ever actually detect corruption among politicians, you can’t allow their findings to be made public! No, no! Their report must first be sent to a specially chosen committee of politicians for them to review it. They may wish to change it before tabling it in the Houses of Parliament, or they may wish to keep its findings secret! Politicians have a right to privacy too! We have to guard against reputational damage.

GAGGED

And we have gagged the Integrity Commission, so that if they ever tell, we can lock them up for a long time.

What some people call “conflict of interest” we call “linkages” and “intelligence” and “vertical integration”. After all, when doing business one must make sure one covers all the angles, and understands all the “runnin’s”. Especially, it is important to know what your adversaries are doing, so you can “cut them off at the pass”. You can’t have a situation where some entity can disrupt your income stream. We must use all the means at our disposal to make sure that secrecy is maintained, so that we can protect ourselves.

Look: some people are calling for transparency, but that would put an end to our business. Old time people seh “not everyt’ing good to know, good to talk”. In our business, “one han’ wash de adda”. That is cooperation and collaboration. Politics is an expensive business. All those T-shirts and caps and armbands we have to give out cost money. To hire all those buses and to buy all that curry goat is not cheap. Not to mention the whole heap a smalls we have to drop. We simply can’t do it alone. Party dues are simply not enough. We have to have partners in this business, and we have to look after them to protect our business model. Transparency simply does not suit us. What some people call nepotism and cronyism and graft is simply what we have to do to make sure the wheels go round. We can never make those things illegal!

And that is why we have to protect our sources of funding Our partners will give us hundreds of millions of dollars to do with what we wish, but they don’t want their names to be called, and they want something in return. That is only reasonable. All these anti-corruption people can talk all they want: we have a good system running, with everybody working together; and we are not about to change it.

EFFECTIVE AND EFFICIENT

In fact, we want to make it more effective and efficient. That is why we have to maintain secrecy, and make it hard for the public to know what is going on behind the scenes. And we have to deepen our control of the system, to make sure that everything is at our service. We have to make sure that we don’t let Constitutional Reform get in the way of our power and control. Because we make the laws, we can make them to suit ourselves. And we have been doing a good job at that so far. Every minister is monarch of his ministry. We don’t want an end to monarchy: we want the power of monarchs, while calling it “democracy”.

Thank God the people don’t know what true democracy is, otherwise we would never get away with it. That is why we can’t do public education on constitutional reform, or operate a top-quality education system for all. We would never be able to get away with what we do!

And we don’t have to worry about the other side. They know how to play the game. In fact, we learnt a lot of the runnin’s from them. They don’t want to mash up the dolly house. We are both on the same side.

And so for the system to work, we can’t be stingy. We have to make sure everybody gets something: the private sector, the public sector, the church, civil society, the media. Even the other side must get something. However, this thing is not about equality; some people have to get more than others. And we have to make sure we who operate the system are secure.

It’s a good system, and it works well for us. We are not bothered by the fact that many people “ketch the rake” and have dropped out of the voting business. As long as the one with the most votes wins, that’s OK. If only 10 people out of 10,000 vote, and six deggeh-deggeh people vote for us, that’s legal!

Carry on foxes! Look after those henhouses!

Peter Espeut is a sociologist and development scientist. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com