EDITORIAL - Listening to Tommy Koh

 Tommy Koh knows Jamaica well. A leading architect of the UN's convention on the Law of the Sea, Mr Koh has been a regular visitor to the island since the early 1980s.

First, he was helping to frame one of the convention's critical organs, the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which is based in Kingston.

These days, Mr Koh likes to come, as was the case with his most recent visit, for sessions of the ISA as head of the delegation from Singapore.

As a diplomat, international jurist and policy analyst - he is special adviser at the Singapore Institute of Policy Studies and chairman of the board at the Centre for International Law at the National University of Singapore - Ambassador Koh, for more than 40 years, has had a first-row seat at, and a hand in, his country's development.

The long and short of it is that we have far greater confidence in any prescription proposed by Tommy Koh for Jamaica's development than in those who argue that somehow the Singaporean model is too complicated and difficult for Jamaicans, which, when you remove the overburden of chaff, is what emerged from the discussion, reported by this newspaper yesterday, at a forum called Leaders-to-Leaders Speakers' Series.

The organisers and speakers deserve credit for having talked.

'uncomplicated' prescription

The point is that Tommy Koh's prescription for Jamaica is, like the catchphrase of one US mobile phone company's ad on cable television, 'uncomplicated'.

He told this newspaper: "Get your fundamentals right. Educate your people well, practise meritocracy, and with the strong rule of law, zero corruption, and a business-friendly economy, you can do it. People don't realise that zero corruption and a strong rule of law are economic strategies."

There is nothing endemic to Singapore, as the Leaders-to-Leaders talkers seem to believe, about such a strategy - being against corruption and in favour of education, the rule of law, and meritocracy.

corruption saps national confidence

What is important is acceptance that corruption represents a no-value tax and cost on economic activity that dissuades investment and undermines development. It also saps national confidence. In Jamaica, nearly 90 per cent of the people believe that our political parties, legislature, and politicians are corrupt, and about half that figure hold similar views of the judiciary and the civil/public service.

The first and fundamental antidote to corruption, perceived or real, is moral government. And it doesn't require a quasi-authoritarian regime or an effectively single-party state for that to happen. Neither does it require Asians or people of Asian descent for it to happen.

Shifting the paradigm of corruption requires, first, leadership that is shamed by our persistent underdevelopment and poverty and appreciates that politics of morality, based on meritocracy and the rule of law are, as Tommy Koh noted, effective strategies to growth and sustainable development.

People will give their leaders room to act if they have a reason to believe that their trust will not be betrayed and that leaders won't, for their own benefit, dip into the national coffers.

Whatever else may have been Singapore's strategy, they were able to create that living consensus: a government that would not steal, but would demand a fair bit of the people in exchange for wealth creation.

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