Editorial | Listen to Dirk Harrison

Jamaicans will be inclined to side with Dirk Harrison in urging the integrity commissioners to get off their backsides and get on with the job they are intended to do – going after the crooks and charlatans who, at the expense of taxpayers, use their public offices for private gain.

For, as Mr Harrison, acting director of prosecutions at the Integrity Commission, argued in a speech last week, Jamaica’s crime-fighting and anti-corruption plans, as currently configured, aren’t working, and continuing “to sit on our posterior” expecting things to change isn’t on.

It won’t be an unexpected, or unreasonable, claim for Mr Harrison’s critics to make that, on this matter, he is a bad actor or, at the very least, not an unbiased one. After all, he remains in limbo over his future at the commission because of a dispute over how to treat the incomplete portion of his contract and pension accruing from his former job as contractor general, which is among the offices subsumed into the new Integrity Commission.

Further, Mr Harrison and his commission bosses were recently publicly at odds over his final report as contractor general probing the sale by the Government’s Urban Development Corporation of a hotel and associated lands, valued at as much as US$13 million but discounted by more than 40 per cent.

Mr Harrison held that this was largely because Daryl Vaz, the minister responsible for economic growth and job creation, butted into the negotiations. Not only did the commissioners disagree with Mr Harrison’s conclusion, but they took the step of attaching post-report rebuttals by Mr Vaz, and others, to Mr Harrison’s findings for tabling in Parliament.

But no matter how his motives are characterised, Mr Harrison’s criticism that, after 15 months in operation – with acting directors for investigations and prosecutions in place – the commission has not initiated a single prosecution isn’t easily dismissed. According to Mr Harrison, there is a backlog of more than 100,000 matters, most of them holdovers from legacy institutions, having largely to do with public servants and parliamentarians failing to file their annual income, assets and liabilities statements.

Mr Harrison’s partial explanation for this state of affairs is that he hasn’t been “fully vested with the powers of … office”, which he describes as a “simple administrative matter”. In any event, he argues, he need not be the one pursuing the prosecutions. The matters could be sent to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and fiats be obtained for private members of the Bar to prosecute the cases.

In the absence of persuasive arguments to the contrary, this newspaper has to agree with Mr Harrison and insist on a full and cogent explanation from the commissioners, whose skills, personal integrity, and good intentions we neither question nor doubt. There is a deepening frustration, however, that they may not be possessed with the sense of urgency demanded by Jamaica’s circumstance. Temperament and professional histories, perhaps, may have bred in them an innate caution.

DEMOCRACY IN DANGER

The fact is, however, that eight out of 10 Jamaicans presume public officials to be corrupt and only the army, of the institutions of the State, has the trust of more than half of the adult population. That isn’t good for a liberal democracy. The corrosion of trust and a high perception of official corruption, including the acceptance of graft and kickbacks, are different sides of the same coin.

Fixing the problem isn’t the job only of the Integrity Commission, but it has a big hand in it, which it must be seen to exercise lest it, too, is held by the public in the same esteem of other institutions of the State – in high contempt and low trust.