Golding backs JAMP accountability tools to strengthen Jamaican government oversight

Former Prime Minister Bruce Golding says Jamaica’s public sector culture does not naturally welcome close examination from oversight bodies.

Golding, who led the Government from 2007 to 2011, said some officeholders treat review and monitoring as “a humbug, an inconvenience [and] an intrusion on the exercise of their functions”. He said that view comes from five decades of dealing with personnel in the civil service and statutory bodies.

Speaking yesterday at the public unveiling of two new digital accountability platforms for citizens, Golding said ministers do not usually arrive in office thinking first about inviting scrutiny.

“After you are sworn in at King’s House and you go down to your ministry, you don’t put on your agenda, ‘Now bring in all of these oversight people so that they can see what I am doing’,” he said.

Golding stressed, however, that resistance to oversight should not automatically be read as evidence of misconduct.

“It is just that, very often, they feel that, ‘Look, I was put here to do a job. Just leave me alone and let me do the job’,” he said.

He also argued that Jamaicans need to better understand the value of watching how governments perform and how public authority is exercised.

Golding commended the Jamaica Accountability Meter Portal, known as JAMP, and its executive director, Jeanette Calder, for their role in encouraging stronger governance and adherence to established rules.

“She is not the only person on the radio who talks about questions of accountability and compliance and so on, but I’ll say this, she has been a credible voice,” Golding said of Calder.

He added that Calder’s advocacy had not been tied to party politics, referring to both the opposition People’s National Party and the governing Jamaica Labour Party.

“In all her interventions, she has been completely non-partisan. Some of them may go off the bend, but neither the PNP nor the JLP would be able to accuse Jeanette Calder of being biased towards or against either of them,” Golding said.

JAMP’s newly launched tools are a public bodies tracker and a sectoral commitment tracker, expanding the organisation’s set of resources for citizens who want to assess the work of government entities.

According to JAMP, the public bodies tracker will carry information on how each entity performs against selected Government of Jamaica corporate governance measures.

The organisation said the data-focused system is intended to identify weaknesses and encourage higher standards among institutions responsible for public money and services.

The sectoral commitment tracker will rely on information secured under the Access to Information Act to show whether pledges made by government ministries have been completed, remain incomplete, or are still in progress.

“Without a systematic record of what was promised and what was delivered, citizens fund the Government year after year with no reliable basis for judging whether their money produced the outcomes they were told it would,” Calder said.