President of the Trans-parency Institute of Guyana Inc (TIGI) Calvin Bernard says the government should create a mechanism through which the public can meaningfully contribute to the Code of Conduct proposed for government ministers and public officials.
Although he thinks the draft code is soft, Bernard commended the government for moving towards putting it in place but stressed that it is important that the process is done correctly.
“We have to give Jack he jacket; it is something positive [but] doing it proper, of course, allows it to have the significance that it deserves. Doing it in an improper manner diminishes the significance,” Bernard told Stabroek News in a recent interview.
Earlier this month, Minister of Governance Raphael Trotman had announced that the draft was completed, but it would await the public’s reaction before it becomes final. Ministers, however, are already abiding by it.
The impression given by Trotman, who crafted the document, was that the government would seek to gauge the feedback to the code through the media, which would release the document.
However, according to Bernard, engaging the public through the media is a “significantly indirect” way of doing it.
“I think the document itself should be made available and beyond making the document available to the public they should engage the public in a meaningful way, perhaps through meetings or some discussions facilitated by a third party,” he said.
Bernard explained that a third party should facilitate the consultation rather than the government, which would naturally seek to defend the code it crafted. He pointed out that the ministers can craft a code of conduct that they are comfortable with but it may not necessarily be one that the people might want.
“A third party facilitator taking that document to the public, they have no stake, all they want to is take it to the public and get the public’s view and they might have an official of the government present to speak for the purpose of clarification but not to defend it and a facilitator would ensure that that person only clarify and not defend,” Bernard said.
He pointed out that if the consultation were to be done only through the media then it only targets those who have access and are articulate and confident enough to engage the media houses, such as through writing letters.
“Likewise if you just make the document available, it depends on if I have the capacity to read and understand and have the confidence to articulate a response to it, then I would do that,” he stressed, while pointing out that some persons would be locked out.
Told that the process of engaging the entire nation on the issue might take years, Bernard disagreed and stated he is not calling for a national consultation on the code but a consultation with a subset of citizens that is representative of the diversity of the population.
“I am suggesting that it goes all the way down at the village level but not for all villages… we are not talking about going to every corner of Guyana to engage but certainly the opinions of persons who live in the area that is considered the interior, their views might be somewhat different from persons on the coast, so you should at least captured that diversity,” he said, while adding that the views of the young may differ from those of the old as well as the views of those with a primary education as opposed to university graduates.
Bernard believes that a month of facilitated discourse will be an efficient mechanism to capture the views of wider cross-section of the population and have them available to be considered to be integrated into the document. He said the distant path of engaging the public through media houses is not the right way since media houses are not going to publish the document in its entirety. Instead, they are going to publish what they think is important and the public would only get a limited view of the contents.
The proposed code, seen by Stabroek News, sets out actions that could result in ministers, parliamentarians and other public office holders facing disciplinary action or being fired, including failure to declare conflicts of interest or accepting expensive gifts or “lavish” entertainment from persons doing business with government.
