Improved showing for JLP – But majority of Jamaicans still think it is more corrupt

THE PRESENT Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) administration is still seen by Jamaicans as the more corrupt of the two major political parties, but the number of people who don’t trust Bruce Golding and his team has declined dramatically since last year.

A Gleaner-commissioned Bill Johnson national poll has found that 26 per cent of Jamaicans believe there is more corruption in the present JLP government than the former People’s National Party (PNP) administration. This, however, is a sharp decline from the 36 per cent who, last April, said the JLP was the more corrupt.

For the PNP, 22 per cent said it was the more corrupt government. This is almost constant with the 23 per cent recorded last year.

The numbers give the PNP a slightly better showing than the JLP on the unofficial ‘corruption perception index’ based on the latest poll by Bill Johnson, which was conducted among 1,008 persons across Jamaica’s 14 parishes from May 28-29, and June 4-5, 2011.

However, with the poll having a margin of error of plus or minus four per cent, the PNP’s better showing is negligible.

Allegations of corruption have long dogged the island’s two main political parties, with Jamaicans looking with suspicion at every development, and the label of ‘scandal’ attached to every charge.

And the public believes that the local media should be doing more to expose acts of corruption. A significant 52 per cent of Jamaicans say they don’t know which of the two political parties is more corrupt, and an almost equal per cent say the media need to do more.

Six out of every 10 Jamaicans do not believe the local media are doing enough to expose the ‘scandals’, while three out of every 10 believe the media are doing enough.

But despite the deep-seated suspicions of the public last year, Jamaica improved, moving from 99 to 87 on the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index after three successive years of decline.

Transparency International’s corruption index draws on 13 different surveys of business people and governance experts, and was conducted between January 2009 and September 2010.

The improvement was given a cautious welcome by Jamaica’s corruption ‘bulldog’, Contractor General Greg Christie, who argued that more needed to be done.

“The Office of the Contractor General notes that in the latest ranking, Transparency International provided no reasons for Jamaica’s improvement and as such it’s not certain what specific anti-corruption efforts, if any, have been taken by the country to warrant such an improved ranking,” Christie declared.

He argued that the executive and the legislative arms of the State need to do much more to review and strengthen the country’s anti-corruption institutional and legislative frameworks, and to significantly increase the sanctions which currently exist for breaches of the anti-corruption laws.

Prime Minister Bruce Golding has repeatedly vowed to take every step to root out corruption and has warned members of his administration that they would get no support from him if they were caught in a corrupt act.

Golding is now leading a charge to create an Office of Special Prosecutor to investigate corrupt practices in the public sector, but subject to the direction of the director of public prosecutions.

Source Jamaica Gleaner