Dawn Ritch, Contributor
AN INIQUITOUS situation is developing at the Bank of Jamaica (BoJ). According to a proposed new law, what the central bank does is to be kept secret for 20 years.
The public is not to be privy to correspondence between the Finance Minister and the Governor of the BoJ. The minutes of the board of directors are to be sequestered from public view. This is the very antithesis of transparency.
It is clear therefore that the Patterson administration has no confidence whatsoever in the soundness of their own decision-making. Something as critical as the means of their technical regulation of the Jamaican economy over the last sixteen years is to be withheld from public gaze for at least another four. The aged and beggared population will be dead by then. The cause of one's despair hardly matters in the grave.
In the most cynical move yet, among many, out-going Prime Minister P. J. Patterson is trying to get an amendment to the Access to Information Act which will provide an exemption for the Bank of Jamaica from the law.
FINAL ANALYSIS
If this amendment is allowed then we will not know what in the final analysis caused the meltdown of the indigenous financial sector. Not for a couple of decades. Any culpable public officials might have died off by then. But the harm done to generations of Jamaicans will live on for a very long time. This censorship of information is diabolical.
Yet the BoJ wants the minutes of its board meetings exempt from public disclosure for 20 years 'or for any period specified by the Finance Minister and subject to 'affirmative resolution' (by the BoJ board)'. This must be the definition of incest on an industrial scale, since it is the Finance Minister who appoints the board members.
HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE
No sensible person can really believe that economic policy is decided in these board meetings. That is the affair purely of the Finance Minister and the BoJ governor in telephone calls and maybe here or there a letter. The immediate disclosure of such little evidence as exists, about what was on their minds is of paramount and historical importance to the country. I marvel that they could think to keep it a secret at all.
The BoJ is the country's central bank and lender of last resort to financial entities operating in the country. The Finance Minister, far from being independent of the BoJ, is its master and its governor his mere creature. They and they alone get to decide whether private bank reserves lodged there must go up or down, which institution is allowed an overdraft, when to grant it if ever, at what interest rate, and for how long.
Dr. Omar Davies charged interest rates on bank overdrafts of 100 per cent and over to certain indigenous financial institutions which have since failed. Indeed before that he bankrupted their borrowers with high interest rates for well over a decade. Now he doesn't want us to know why he did it, the details of the exact process and time line of the financial sector meltdown, as seen from the cat bird's seat.
The reality is that the directors of BoJ perform no role in setting monetary policy. All they deal with are administrative matters. Is the real reason behind this new amendment to hide directives from the Minister of Finance which could include specific instructions to target entities under the BoJ's supervision?
In England, the minutes of the Bank of England are now published, including dissent, to allow the public to assess how decisions are arrived at. This allows for transparency and a better understanding of the issues. Similarly the deliberations of the Federal Reserve in the United States are made public once the meeting is concluded.
Having held us in blind thrall for 16 years, Patterson, with the complicity of Omar Davies, wants to keep how he did it a secret for another 20 years. It seems he never tires of new ways to punish us even after he's long gone. The PNP Government says it believes in transparency, but this step shows it is an empty commitment, and way out of line with the rest of the world.
RIDICULOUS AND DANGEROUS
It is absolutely ridiculous to suggest that the BoJ should be treated any differently from Government and other public sector entities. Ridiculous and dangerous. Give them this amendment and it will create nothing else but an invincibility to protect them from the consequences of the wanton abuse of power.
They say they need this amendment in order to protect the directors, but the directors are in the dark on policy any way, so their protection doesn't much matter. No Finance Minister in any country in the world has yet been able to pass off his responsibilities on the board of the central bank. He and his Prime MInister pluck these worthies from thither and yon for table decoration. Nary a one will even have the opportunity of causing a crash through the central bank. That is the sole privilege of the finance minister and the governor of the central bank.
This is no doubt the real reason the Bank has suggested that correspondence between the minister responsible for its affairs and the Bank's governor should be specifically exempted from compliance with the provisions of the Access to Information Act. This campaign of concealment must therefore not be allowed to succeed.
Nobody, not even the Parliament or the Senate, has been able to get any information from the BoJ about the financial meltdown. They claim that this is privileged information because it involves the fortunes, or lack of them, of private financial institutions. Since these institutions are the very nervous system of an economy's operation I would have thought this complete justification for making the information public, not secret. Only on that basis can ordinary citizens be guaranteed an orderly economy with a level playing field, as distinct from one which is mere feather-bedding for the nest of a few potentates.
Let the record show therefore, that in the dying hours of his administration P. J. Patterson tried to enshrine a legacy of unaccountability, secrecy and privilege in governance.
