by Sir Arthur Foulkes
In response to criticisms that there may have been political interference and manipulation in the recent promotions in the Royal Bahamas Police Force, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of National Security Cynthia Pratt is quoted by The Bahama Journal as asking: “When is there not politics involved?”
According to The Journal, Mrs. Pratt then queried whether the police consider it political interference when the political directorate gives the Force money for cars, weapons and other necessities.
Cabinet ministers and others in the present administration seem to have difficulty with our system of government and the separation and delimitation of functions between the various authorities and agencies of the state, even the foundational concept of separation of powers between the three principal divisions of the state itself.
From the very beginning one of the PLP Government’s more knowledgeable and promising ministers publicly lamented that when he walked into his new ministry he found himself in an institution where he knew no one and no one knew him.
He wanted to bring in a whole new category of persons with whom he had previously worked, who shared his campaign goals and who could interface with the civil servants in his ministry. He wanted to be like an incoming president of the United States who changes all the people at the top.
Incidentally, both President George W. Bush and his partner British Prime Minister Tony Blair are now learning a valuable lesson, too late for them but perhaps of value for others in the future. It is that broken forms of government more often than not result in bad governance.
Martin Kettle of The Guardian of London, says that both men came to office suspicious of the systems they inherited and eager to change them. But in trying to circumvent their systems, they both made disastrous miscalculations.
Mr. Bush listened to the war party in the Pentagon and did not want to hear voices in the State Department and in his own intelligence agencies while he and his arrogant neocon ideologues pushed their agenda for the invasion of Iraq.
Now his presidency is discredited and America is locked into a war and an occupation that is costing thousands of lives, hundreds of billions of dollars and the goodwill of the rest of the world.
The one friend who might have been able to dissuade Mr. Bush from this reckless adventure was British Prime Minister Tony Blair. But Mr. Blair also circumvented the established processes of his own system of government.
Mr. Kettle referred to the Hutton Inquiry of 2003 which revealed the system of so-called “sofa government” featuring unminuted huddles between the Prime Minister and a small group of officials through which Mr. Bair chose to govern.
Papers were not circulated to some ministers and it became difficult for those not directly involved to play a meaningful part. The result was more miscalculation, and Mr. Blair, instead of restraining Mr. Bush with sorely-needed realistic advice, only added to the folly.
There are people in the PLP including Prime Minister Perry Christie who know full well what our system of government is about. Some of them are educated in constitutional law. They know, or ought to know, that broken forms of government are likely to lead to bad governance.
Still, the relentless attack on our system of government has continued for five years. The PLP started out by hiring a slew of mostly useless consultants in their haste to circumvent the civil service. But their most dangerous interference has been the attack on the independence of the judiciary.
All systems of government can benefit from healthy change and evolution, of course, so that stagnation and inertia do not set in. Very rarely does radical change become necessary or advisable in a system that has been steadily evolving.
The prime consideration is that those who influence the processes of change understand what they are dealing with in the first place. The people who make or are trained to maintain a Rolls Royce engine are qualified to make changes but a bush mechanic will almost certainly ruin it.
The PLP minister who found it difficult to work with civil servants at the outset is, like Mr. Christie, quite knowledgeable about the system. He had made many speeches about what should be done by way of reform. There has been little studied reform but a lot of destructive interference.
Perhaps the answer lies in the arrogance and sudden omniscience that afflict some people as soon as they are placed in positions of power. The late Eugene Dupuch used to say that this phenomenon was precipitated by the “rarefied atmosphere” of the cabinet room that went directly and swiftly to their heads.
Ministers in the throes of this affliction seem to think that they actually have arbitrary control over the institutions and agencies listed in their portfolios and that their remit bestows on them all knowledge and power.
They seem to forget that our constitution and our statutes are all about the rule of law and are replete with elaborate provisions to separate and define the functions, and to limit the powers, of every division of government and every agency and authority.
It is true that there can be no absolute separation of powers in a system based on the will of the people expressed through democratically-elected representation. That is precisely why the constitution and other laws go to such pains to set out the extent of separation and the division of power, and to establish buffer zones between them.
Some of the items in a minister’s portfolio are departments that he may have direct responsibility for and even these are not at his arbitrary disposal. There are others in which a minister may be responsible for relations with a particular agency, authority, semi-governmental institution or non-governmental entity.
Managing the relationship with one of these agencies may mean that the minister and his government and are responsible for providing money, accommodations and facilities. It may even mean in some cases that the minister must on a daily basis work closely and in consultation with a particular agency.
It does not mean that because the minister and the government are responsible for providing money and equipment for an agency that they have a right to exercise control over it and to manipulate it for partisan political purposes or for personal aggrandizement.
In short, the responsibility to provide funds does not carry with it the right to exercise political interference and to manipulate the Police Force for political purposes.
Perhaps the failure to understand -- or to accept -- this was at the root of the confrontation over the independence of the judiciary. This has done serious damage to our system of government because there is no clearer separation of power in our system than the separation between the judiciary and the executive.
The money in the Treasury belongs to the people of The Bahamas, not to a political party nor to ministers of the government. The people have a right to expect that the police will be provisioned without any obligation to any politician or political party.
The people also have a right to expect that the disbursement of public funds to the judiciary should take place in accordance with the legitimate needs of that pillar – not agency -- of the state and that the judiciary has no reciprocal obligation to be grateful or beholden or subservient to the executive or the legislature.
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