CLOSING THE SCRUTINY GAP

Public officials in Jamaica do not “instinctively” embrace oversight and monitoring, former Prime Minister Bruce Golding has asserted.

 Golding, who served as prime minister between 2007 and 2011, said oversight and monitoring for some officials “is a humbug, an inconvenience [and] an intrusion on the exercise of their functions”.

 The assertion, he explained, is based on 50 years of experience working with people across the civil service and statutory agencies.

 “After you are sworn in at King’s House and you go down to your ministry, you don’t put on your agenda, ‘Now bring in all of these oversight people so that they can see what I am doing’,” he said yesterday during the public launch of two digital accountability tools for citizens.

 However, Golding was quick to point out that “this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are involved in wrongdoing”.

 “It is just that, very often, they feel that, ‘Look, I was put here to do a job. Just leave me alone and let me do the job’," he said.

 Golding also suggested that citizens have to become more aware that keeping an eye on their government is good and worthwhile.

 He endorsed the work of the civil society group Jamaica Accountability Meter Portal (JAMP) and its executive director, Jeanette Calder, in promoting good governance and compliance with established guidelines.

 “She is not the only person on the radio who talks about questions of accountability and compliance and so on, but I’ll say this, she has been a credible voice,” Golding said of Calder.

 “In all her interventions, she has been completely non-partisan. Some of them may go off the bend, but neither the PNP nor the JLP would be able to accuse Jeanette Calder of being biased towards or against either of them,” he added, making reference to the country’s two main political parties, the opposition People’s National Party and the governing Jamaica Labour Party.

 A tracker for public bodies and a sectoral commitment tracker are the latest additions to the suite of tools provided by JAMP that allows citizens to monitor the performance of more government entities.

 The tracker for public bodies will be populated with the findings of each entity’s compliance with selected Government of Jamaica corporate governance indicators, JAMP revealed.

 It said this data-driven approach will shed light on areas that need improvement and uphold higher standards for institutions that are the stewards of public funds and services.

 The sectoral commitment tracker will use data obtained through the Access to Information Act to confirm whether undertakings by government ministries “are fulfilled, not fulfilled or ongoing”.

 “Without a systematic record of what was promised and what was delivered, citizens fund the Government year after year with no reliable basis for judging whether their money produced the outcomes they were told it would,” Calder noted.

livern.barrett@gleanerjm.com