THE EDITOR, Sir:
ADMINISTRATIVE AND political corruption are a fact of life. It is a myth that various forms of corruption are absent from the cultural fabric of First World societies. The highly regarded federal government of Canada was just recently rocked by a huge scandal related to the inappropriate use of public funds in pursuit of a distasteful partisan agenda. Here in the United States local, state and federal governments and agencies have (and do continue) to experience much corruption.
The administration of former Los Angeles mayor James Hahn was under intense scrutiny by federal police agencies for questionable administrative practices. Miami and a number of other major U.S. cities have all experienced embarrassing episodes of corruption-based scandals on the level of a cheap Hollywood soap opera.
A significant difference between corruption in most First World countries and that of the Third World, however, is the tendency for dishonest public actions to be both discovered more quickly and dealt with more severely by grassroots entities. After all, were powerful U.S. presidents Nixon and Clinton not rocked by the actions of relatively unknown/ ordinary citizens (even if one argues within the context that they were propelled by more powerful, sinister national forces)? There is definitely a tendency for government officials to be incarcerated and/or booted from office more quickly in First World countries than is the case in much of the Third World.
TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY
One significant reason for such transparency and accountability is the "people power" exercised within the parameters of a federal model of government: one in which all important fiscal resources are not excessively centralised and thus out of the purview and influence of a politically empowered voting public. For instance, the current scandal at Jamaica's National Solid Waste Agency (which operates within a highly centralised/topdown structure of unitary government) could not have been easily triggered by disgruntled constituents living in rural Jamaica, nor could a disgruntled rural taxpayer stand a heightened chance of success in terms of being able to directly initiate the firing or hiring of public officials serving from national statutory agencies and ministries in a distant capital city. This reality of a lack of grassroots political empowerment is due to the tendency for spatial disconnect between the ordinary citizen and his tax resources within what is essentially a 'dictatorial' top-down unitary model of government (as found in Jamaica).
Within First World democracies exhibiting the federal model, however, there is an increased likelihood that public servants will cower at offending the grassroots constituent, given that access to developmental fiscal resources are not restricted to those who control the national Parliament/Congress but indeed those engaged in governance at the lower state/provincial and municipal levels.
Thus, if Jamaica had in place a system of fiscally empowered/functionally focused county governments charged with delivering prescribed services to a politically empowered grassroots constituency, accountability and transparency would be heightened on two fronts: 1) from the national central government level looking down 'objectively' on the bottom-up operations of county-based local government agencies; and 2) from below via the direct scrutiny exercised by grassroots voters concerned with the quality of services exacted from their scarce hard-earned taxes.
It is with this perspective in mind that I challenge both major parties to seriously reconsider their commitment to maintaining what is in essence a spatially dysfunctional, archaic, colonial structure of top-down unitary government (in which the people are not encouraged towards proactive participatory governance) and instead pursue a more democratic, grassroots sensitive, timely and thus cost-effective bottom-up administrative approach via
fiscally empowered system of local government.
I am, etc.,
GARFIELD O. WHITTAKER
garfield.whittaker@csun.edu
Department of Geography
California State University,
Northridge
Via Go-Jamaica
