Basil Jarrett | Behind the headlines, beyond the silos

 The Jamaica Accountability Meter Portal (JAMP) held a forum titled, ‘Behind the Headlines: Understanding and Supporting Jamaica’s State Accountability Institutions’. Present at the event was the alphabet soup of Jamaica’s national accountability architecture: IC. MOCA. RPD. FID. AGD. 

To the average Jamaican, these acronyms sound more like somebody fell asleep with their finger on the keyboard, rather than the sum total of Jamaica’s guardianship of the public purse and the public trust.

The event was designed to put Jamaica’s key anti-corruption and accountability bodies in the same room, in front of the same audience, talking not just about what they do, but how they can better understand, support and complement each other. 

The assembly of the Integrity Commission (IC), the Major Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency (MOCA), the Revenue Protection Department (RPD), the Financial Investigations Division (FID) and the Auditor General Department (AGD) represents some of the key pillars of the fight to hold persons accountable to the people of this country.

But, one of the enduring frustrations in Jamaica’s anti-corruption and law-enforcement landscape is that every institution tends to be understood in isolation. When MOCA is in the news, it is usually because of some breakthrough in a major organised crime or anti-corruption investigation. When the IC is being discussed, it is usually because somebody forgot to file a statutory declaration or when some urgent procurement breach has occurred. The AGD shows up almost weekly these days, when a report drops and everybody starts quoting the juiciest paragraphs. Then there is the FID and RPD, drifting in and out of public consciousness depending on which tax, customs or financial scandal is currently bubbling.

ORGANISED RESPONSE

But, since corruption, financial crime, revenue leakage, procurement abuse, illicit enrichment and weak oversight does not happen in isolation, neither can the response mechanism set up to detect, defeat and deter them. The suspicious customs transaction today may become the money laundering investigation tomorrow and the procurement irregularity buried in an audit report quickly becomes the evidentiary backbone of another agency’s case. 

That is why regular dialogue is critical.

You see, most Jamaicans only interact with these accountability bodies almost entirely through headlines. We do not always understand mandates, limits, evidentiary burdens, legal thresholds, staffing constraints, budget issues, or the very real challenge of trying to hold powerful people accountable in a small society where everybody seems to know somebody who went to school with somebody’s cousin.

COST OF IGNORANCE 

That ignorance is costly. When the public does not understand how these bodies work, it becomes easier for bad-faith actors to discredit them with accusations of incompetence or overreach. Before long, mistrust fills the gaps where public understanding should have been. 

If society doesn’t understand the difference between an audit finding and a criminal charge, or where institutional mandates begin and end, it will demand the wrong things from the wrong bodies. If the public isn’t brought into the accountability conversation, then anti-corruption work remains trapped in the foreign language of legislation and procedure instead of becoming part of a broader civic ethic.

And that broader ethic is exactly what Jamaica has been missing for so many years.

We tend to treat corruption like the weather. We complain about it, brace for it, maybe put out a few tweets about it, but then pack our umbrellas and make our bitter peace with it. We assume and accept that public money will leak, contracts will look and smell odd, and politically connected people will always somehow land on their feet. And, because we assume all that, we often fail to build the kind of muscular public culture that protects, defends and supports the institutions trying to fight back.

MISSING PIECE

That is why these bodies need to sit together regularly and understand one another’s pain points. This allows them to coordinate better, spot trends earlier ,and build habits of trust and communication before the next crisis. Just as importantly, it allows them to present a more coherent picture to the public of what accountability actually looks like in practice. 

But there was also another critical group, present at the forum, that needs to be highlighted for their equally important role in the accountability battle: our media. 

The fight for transparency, accountability and integrity is fought not only in courtrooms, audit reports and intelligence files, but also in headlines, talk shows and timelines. If journalists do not understand or report accurately on these often-complex matters, then the public gets noise instead of knowledge and apathy instead of clarity. Our media therefore cannot remain a mere spectator and score-keeper in the accountability project. It has to become a more informed, more responsible partner in it, with regular dialogue and conversations outside of the latest breaking news cycle. Not only to better help the watchdogs explain themselves, and to do so with greater fairness, accuracy and depth, but also to help people interpret what’s really going on, beyond the headlines. 

In that regard, there may be few stronger weapons in the accountability fight than institutions that collaborate well and a media corps that understands exactly what is at stake.

Major Basil Jarrett is the director of communications at the Major Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency and a crisis communications consultant. Follow him on X, Instagram, and Threads @IamBasilJarrett.