Had President Bharrat Jagdeo not been a member of the cabinet for nearly fifteen years, his latest instruction for an investigation into illegalities at the Guyana Revenue Authority’s Customs and Trade Administration would have been an impressive initiative to excise the cancer of corruption. But the President’s resort to a non-judicial probe is not new, is not surprising and is not going to solve the problem of graft in the government.
First, as special economic adviser to the Minister of Finance in October 1992, then as junior Minister of Finance from October 1993 and as senior Minister of Finance from May 1995, Mr Jagdeo has been well placed to observe the corrupt way business has been conducted at the Customs and Trade Administra-tion. Back in 1999, soon after he had assumed office as President, he announced that “everyone in my government would have to conduct their business transparently or they would not have a part in the government.”
The next year, President Jagdeo declared that the Customs Department was “renowned for corruption,” adding, “We all know that there is corruption in that department. You have patrol officers and junior officers who come into the service and work for three, four months and they can buy a car and a house. Senior civil servants who worked their whole life can never be able to own the assets that those people own.” So, it seems evident that Mr Jagdeo knew this much in January 2000, over eight years ago. What has he done to deal with corruption there?
