ONE of the major ailments in today’s world is corruption, and one encounters daily reports of it from all parts of the world. There are many dimensions of it and it operates both nationally and internationally.  Nationally, it is well known and internationally, it is associated with such crimes as money laundering and trafficking in persons.  Corruption has often been defined as “Misuse of public power and assets for private gain.”  This definition, though it captures the major and most important area of corruption,  does not encompass the day-to-day corruption which ordinary folk must face, such as having to pay bribes to access public services, or paying bribes to obtain employment or promotions or having to suffer exploitation from the state machinery itself.

The enormity of the ailment is so all-pervasive that the efforts of private persons and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) to deal with it, though useful and necessary, are eventually overwhelmed.  It is only the state that has the necessary resources and staying power that can successfully confront it and eliminate it.  The main reason why it has become one of the imperatives for the state to fight corruption is that it undermines Democracy and the Meritocracy ushered in with the Industrial Revolution. It militates against economic and social development and ultimately oppresses the citizenry.

The Government of Guyana, over the years,  has been making efforts to grapple with corruption and a most recent effort was at the beginning of September when an anti-corruption workshop spearheaded by the Hon  Gail Teixeira, Minister of Parliamentary Affairs and Governance, took place.  This workshop was supported by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).  Minister Teixeira emphasised the need for Guyana to build its institutional capacity to eliminate instances of bribery, underhand deals, fraud and exploitation in the public sector, while Mr Jason Reicheit of UNODC stressed that the COVID-19 Pandemic has opened new areas of corruption in the procurement of medical supplies and equipment, distribution, treatment and manufacture of vaccines.

Minister Teixeira is well aware of the pervasive and multifaceted nature of corruption and realises that it could touch every aspect of government activity, and so invited all the main government agencies to participate.  At the risk of being superfluous, we name those agencies:the Public Service Commission;  Police Service Commission;  Ombudsman;  Integrity Commission;  Special Organized Crime Unit;  Public Procurement Commission;  departments under the Police Force;  Auditor General;  Financial Intelligence Unit;  Judicial Service Commission;  Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions;  the Ministry of Legal Affairs;  the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board and Bankers Association of Guyana.

Various formulas have been put forward worldwide to fight corruption, such as keeping the law abreast with the kaleidoscopic changes in corruption;  protecting whistleblowers;  steeply increasing salaries of the police and public servants, etc.  Whatever methods have been tried worldwide, none of them has been able to eliminate corruption.  It would seem to us that corruption could only be reduced to its pre-World War II modest levels by cultural change brought about making anti-corruption an item of the education system from the nursery level upwards.  In this effort, print and electronic media will have to be enlisted.

The Guyana Consumers Association is convinced that many of the instances of corruption which occur at the ministerial and Public Service levels are the result of ignorance of the Financial Regulations and General Orders governing the Public Service and have sent on to the relevant Authorities some ideas of how training could be delivered to these groups.