Editorial | What the PM must do

Having been exculpated by the prosecutor at the Integrity Commission (IC) of unethically facilitating the award of contracts to a colleague and friend while he was education minister, Prime Minister Andrew Holness should be even more cognisant of why the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) is bad policy and the inherent dangers it poses for conflicts of interest by politicians. He can only concede that it must go.

At the same time, the issue – and the appropriate dispatch with which the IC's director of corruption prosecution, Keisha Prince-Kameka, acted in clearing Mr Holness – provides another platform from which the prime minister can launch, as this newspaper proposed weeks ago, an “assault on corruption in all its forms” and making it “the centrepiece of his legacy building efforts”.

Indeed, we continue to insist that there are few things that Mr Holness could do “that would so firmly secure his place in Jamaica's history”.

The prime minister should start this renewed engagement by being open and frank with Jamaicans about the difficulties that have prevented the IC from certifying his assets and liabilities declaration for 2021, thereby delaying the commission's publication of a summary of the report.

CLOSING LOOPHOLES

His administration should also quickly implement the IC's several recommendations for closing loopholes in the integrity law, including the removal of the gag clause that prevents the commissioners from speaking about an investigation in any manner unless a report on it has first been tabled in Parliament.

The issue that entangled Mr Holness, until the tabling of Ms Prince-Kameka's ruling in Parliament yesterday, involved a company named Westcon Construction Limited, owned by friends of Mr Holness, including Robert Garvin, who once worked as an aide-organiser to the prime minister in his parliamentary constituency. Mr Garvin was apparently also a business partner of the prime minister and his wife, Juliet Holness.

Between 2007 and 2009 when Mr Holness was the education minister, Westcon received 10 relatively small contracts from the ministry, totalling nearly J$22 million, to repair facilities.

Between 2009 and 2016 it received 34 contracts from the National Works Agency (NWA) worth over $33.8 million and between 2007 and 2009 two small contracts from the Social Development Commission (SDC) for just under J$2 million.

Mr Holness rejected that he in any way influenced the contracts awarded by the education ministry to Westcon during his tenure. Neither is there evidence that he did.

With respect to the NWA, the agency with oversight for the Government's infrastructure projects, the work done by Westcon, mostly for the cleaning of drains and culverts and overgrown verges in communities, is of the kind that is often covered by the CDF – a fund that allocates J$20 million to each parliamentarian for spending on projects or initiatives relating to their constituencies. While MPs, supposedly, do not directly spend the money, they generally 'recommend' to the implementing agencies who should do the work or the individuals who should receive a benefit.

However, the NWA didn't produce records of the basis on which the Westcon contracts had been approved. Like the other agencies, it didn't fully adhere to the rules for reporting the contracts into which it entered.

Regarding the contracts by the SDC, which at the time oversaw the CDF programme, Mr Holness insists that he had no power to direct or instruct the SDC – and didn't – to give contracts to Westcon although he recommended the company at the request of the commission in an emergency situation.

Nonetheless, Kevon Stephenson, the Integrity Commission's director of investigations, in a report tabled in Parliament this week, contended that Mr Holness influenced the award of the contracts to Westcon, raising a prima facie case of conflict of interest.

NO ATTEMPT

However, on the basis that Mr Holness' insistence that there was no attempt by him to undermine the integrity of the SDC's procurement and payment system, and what Ms Prince-Kameka said was an absence of material to contradict his account, the allegations that he interfered in the procurement process could “no longer be substantiated as there is no evidence of the alleged interference”. Mr Holness was also helped by the fact that there was no refutation of his claim that at the time when the matter was unfolding, the CDF had no formal regulations covering its operations.

Having become a near victim of the corrosive effect of the CDF, Mr Holness will, hopefully, now be amenable to phasing it out as this newspaper long suggested.

Its perpetuation provides opportunities for small-scale patronage, which have the capacity to mutate and metastasise, worsening the endemic cancer of corruption with which Jamaica grapples.

The CDF endures, of course, because it is one of the few programmes for which there is strong and consistent cross-party support despite past reports of how it has supported cronyism. Politicians like it because it allows them to be bearers of patronage without having to do the hard work to make the agencies and institutions of government really work.

In Mr Holness' case, however, current events are an opportunity to segue to a deep and relentless campaign against corruption – and a grand chance to embark on a legacy-securing project.