Commentary

This newspaper welcomes the swift response of the contractor general, Mr Greg Christie, to the calls for an investigation by his office of the Manatt, Phelps & Phillips scandal to determine the role of public officials in the hiring of the US law/lobby firm and whether, as Manatt insists, it was engaged on behalf of the Jamaican government rather than the ruling Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), as Prime Minister Bruce Golding says was the case.

We do not agree with Mr Christie's seemingly narrow interpretation of his powers under Section 2 of the Contractor General Act, which seeks to define what is a government contract. We would have preferred a more expansive interpretation of his authority under section 4 (1), even at the risk of the matter being subject to judicial review.

Nonetheless, we sense that Mr Christie would not be averse to investigating the issue once the assumed hurdles are cleared.

In that regard, given the fuzziness that shrouds the Manatt scheme and the inability of Mr Golding to bring clarity to the situation, we recommend to the prime minister that he invites Mr Christie and the Office of the Contractor General to probe the affair.

Such an investigation can be engineered, we believe, if Prime Minister Golding is serious about his pledge of atonement, including a new approach to governance that is underpinned by truth and transparency.

Mr Golding admitted to authorising the initiative for the JLP to insert itself, by hiring Manatt, in a diplomatic matter between Kingston and Washington regarding our government's refusal to extradite accused drug dealer Christopher Coke.

But the PM has been, at best, opaque about how the scheme went so badly awry. And except for Mr Harold Brady, who was the middleman to Manatt, Mr Golding has not named the culprits or say how precisely they breached his instructions.

Nor has he been clear about the roles or responsibility of Justice Minister Dorothy Lightbourne, Solicitor General Douglas Leys or other government officials in facilitating the arrangement and contributing to Manatt's interpretation of its ultimate employer. And Mr Golding has not disclosed who paid Manatt's bill, or provided bankable assurances that the money was not, as Edward Seaga once put it, "tainted".

Mr Golding's flaccidity on these matters, despite his promise of atonement and new era of transparency, raised not unreasonable questions of whether he is the real leader, and not captive, of his Cabinet.

Clear away cobwebs

If Mr Golding is indeed in charge of the Government and intends to fulfil the mandate he outlined Monday night, he must start by immediately clearing away the cobwebs around Manatt and begin to show real leadership in the Coke extradition.

The stance of the prime minister and the Government over the past nine months, ostensibly on legal principle - so easily reversed Monday night - will likely make the extradition proceedings more problematic than they need have been. Already, Tivoli Gardens, the heart of Mr Golding's West Kingston constituency and Mr Coke's safe haven, has been barricaded, supposedly to prevent an incursion from the security forces.

It will be the test of the prime minister's leadership to ensure that this matter is concluded with peace and the absence of the mayhem that has been forewarned, and which so many fear.

The opinions on this page, except for the above, do not necessarily reflect the views of The Gleaner. To respond to a Gleaner editorial, email us: editor@gleanerjm.com or fax: 922-6223. Responses should be no longer than 400 words. Not all responses will be published.