Despite his claim to the contrary, Donald Buchanan, Information and Development Minister, could only have been speaking for himself. He could not have been speaking on behalf of the Government. He certainly did not speak for the Jamaican people. For wish as he may for it to be history, there remains unfinished business in the Trafigura affair.

Not least of the matters to be addressed is the apology that the chairman of the People's National Party (PNP) and Minister of Transport and Works, Robert Pickersgill, seems to have forgotten. It is something that we had hoped that Mr. Pickersgill - like the Attorney-General A.J. Nicholson and the Foreign Minister Anthony Hylton after their faux pas - would have remembered of his own accord. But if Mr. Pickersgill, quite out of character, we believe, lacks the grace to retreat and say sorry, then his boss, Prime Minister Simpson Miller, must demand that he does.

For as Mrs. Simpson Miller would surely agree, Pickersgill's attack on Mark Myers, the president of the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce (JCC), was not only in poor taste, but unworthy of a healthy democracy and the fostering of the development of civil society and its role in enhancing the quality of governance.

Maybe with the passage of time, some of us might not immediately recall the action of Mr. Pickersgill that we found offensive. At a revelation that Trafigura Beheer, a Dutch commodities trader with which the Government does business, had ostensibly donated J$31 million to Mr. Pickersgill's party, Mr. Myers, on behalf of the chamber, called for a full explanation and offered the JCC's good office to help the political parties devise a protocol for the management of political donations.

Mr. Pickersgill's dismissive response was to declare Mr. Myers to be "genetically linked" to the Opposition, obviously a reference to the fact that he is the son-in-law of the Shadow Health Minister, Dr. Kenneth Baugh. We expect Mr. Pickersgill and his apologists will seek to excuse his behaviour with some tit-for-tat explanation.

That, however, would be unworthy. For it assumes that because of their familial relationships, or for that matter political persuasions, people are not capable of taking ethical and moral positions, and should not be in positions of leadership except in political organisations. Such thinking is not only a stain on our democracy, but a recipe for keeping our best talent away from public service in all forms.

But back to Mr. Buchanan. We have already argued that he was a bad choice as information minister, a job that gives him a complex portfolio and makes him the Government's chief spokesman. He is already proving our point, with his potentially foot-in-mouth declaration of the Trafigura affair as history.

Well, we remind Mr. Buchanan of our call for the DPP and the police, as well as Parliament's Integrity Commission, to investigate the role of Mr. Buchanan's predecessor, and any other member of the Cabinet, in Trafigura's payment. For no one is certain whether this was really a gift to the PNP or payment for services rendered by people in or having connection with the Government, as was implied by Trafigura.