By Stabroek staff | 2 Comments
Editorial | Thursday, January 27, 2011
On Monday last, the first day of the 2011 budget debates,
Alliance For Change Chairman, Mr Khemraj Ramjattan MP,
provoked a strident outburst in Parliament
when he referred to
a lack of transparency and accountability by the government
and drew a parallel between that
and Minister of Housing Mr Irfaan Ali
being hauled before the House Privileges Committee last year
over a $4 billion supplementary allocation
for work in the housing sector that was sought in 2010,
after it would have been already spent the previous year.
So raucous were the cries of the government MPs
in defence of their colleague that
Speaker of the House Mr Ralph Ramkarran
was forced to suspend the sitting for some 15 minutes.
What may have incensed
those occupying the government benches even more,
was the fact that Mr Ramjattan
took to the House and read from,
Improving Public Accountability: The Guyana Experience 1985 – 2007,
a book by former Auditor General Mr Anand Goolsarran,
whose rows with government officials
over their constant deviation from standard
and acceptable accounting practices were common knowledge.
Mr Goolsarran’s annual reports
on the audits of government accounts
complete with recommendations were refreshingly straightforward
and often highly anticipated by citizens
who opposed underhand business.
But it was his public, often scathing,
commentary of the way the country’s accountability
was being handled that rankled, apparently.
It may be recalled that it was under Mr Goolsarran’s watch
that the misappropriation of some US$2.5 million
in the sale of Guyana’s gold overseas
through the manipulation of the daily spot rate was unearthed.
And who can forget the $50 million Wildlife Department fraud or
the illegal sale of dolphins by a government functionary.
Mr Goolsarran’s methods were –
to put it mildly – unappreciated;
he found himself out in the cold,
so to speak,
and subsequently accepted employment
with the United Nations as executive secretary
to the UN Board of Auditors.
Today, five years after Mr Goolsarran’s departure
from the Guyana Public Service
government agencies still deviate
from the accounting norms built into the system
that would ensure accountability;
not much has changed.
What is a pity is that the government ministers
and their colleagues in Parliament
don’t seem to take the same approach
to the workings of their respective ministries and agencies.
We don’t hear them shouting and screaming
when frauds are unearthed or
when the Public Accounts Committee questions
an untendered contract that may be kosher
but could very well have not been.
Instead, they or their permanent secretaries or
other accounting officers go quietly
before the committee
and defend what is clearly inexcusable.
In October last year,
Transparency International (TI)
published its annual corruption index
which gave Guyana a rating of 2.7,
with 10 being very clean
and 0 being highly corrupt;
Guyana was also ranked at 116 out of 178 countries.
At the time the administration
had also slammed the TI report,
calling it suspect and trying to deride its sources
which included the Economist Intelligence Unit,
the World Bank and Freedom House –
an internationally renowned NGO based in WashingtonDC,
which is an advocate
for political freedom, democracy and human rights.
As TI had stated in its report,
which gleans data from over a dozen sources,
“with governments committing huge sums
to tackle the world’s most pressing problems,
from the instability of financial markets
to climate change and poverty,
corruption remains an obstacle
to achieving much needed progress.”
The PPP administration should know
that it ought to be doing much more
than stamping and screaming in Parliament
like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum
to reduce and remove not just corruption
but any perception that it exists,
to ensure that true progress and development
are underway in this country.