Editorial | Jamaica and the global face of corruption

If you were a leader in a country where corruption is, or is perceived to be, rife, this past week would probably be unsettling, given what has been happening to colleagues around the world. Public officials in Jamaica may have taken note. But perhaps not. They should be made to have cause to.

In Peru, President Pedro Kuczynski, 20 months in office, resigned a day before Congress began impeachment hearings against him. Mr Kuczynski, 79, is ensnared in a corruption scandal - involving the construction company Odebrecht - that has its genesis in Brazil but has spread across Latin America.

In Brazil itself, in a strand of the same scandal that brought down President Kuczynski, an appeal court in Porto Alegre not only upheld a corruption conviction against former president Luiz In·cio Lula da Silva, but increased his jail sentence from nine and a half to a dozen years. Lula does have another shot at overturning the conviction, but may well have to begin serving his sentence in a matter of weeks as well as being barred from running for president next year despite still being the front-runner in opinion polls. Even if he is finally exonerated, Lula still has four other corruption cases hanging over him.

Also in Brazil, President Michel Temer faces racketeering charges, having been accused of taking bribes from a meatpacking company for political favours. While Mr Temer's allies in the Brazilian congress have insulated him from immediate prosecution, the charges remain live. President Temer could be taken before the courts when his term ends next year.

In the week's other signal event, Jacob Zuma, the former South African president who was forced from office by party colleagues in February, has been summoned to appear in court next week to answer corruption charges relating to a 1990s arms deal scandal while he was vice-president. Those charges were withdrawn in 2009, just before Mr Zuma became president, but were recently reinstituted by the courts. Mr Zuma is under investigation over claims involving a powerful business family to which the ex-president is close.

Perception of corruption

In Jamaica, nearly eight in 10 adults believe that public officials are corrupt or highly corrupt and perhaps three-quarters of the country have little trust in politicians and political parties. Indeed, so concerned are Jamaicans about corruption that over half (53 per cent) of them would be willing to temporarily suspend democratic norms to tackle the problem. In other words, they would welcome an army takeover for a time even if it meant giving up some individual rights. This is understandable given that the Jamaica Defence Force has consistently emerged as the country's best trusted institution in the Latin American public opinion survey coordinated by Vanderbilt University as part of its Democracy in the Americas project.

Despite these deeply held convictions about the state of corruption in the country, rarely has a Jamaican public official or politician been hauled before the courts for graft or illicit enrichment. In the early 1990s, a former labour minister, J.A.G. Smith, and his permanent secretary, Probyn Aitken, were jailed for stealing money from the farm workers' programme. In the mid-2000s, a junior minister, Kern Spencer, was tried and acquitted over the alleged corrupt management of a project in which light bulbs donated by Cuba were to be delivered to householders. There have also been the occasional low-level local government official and police officers charged with corruption, but little else.

A new omnibus anti-corruption agency, for which Parliament approved legislation, is soon to be launched with its own prosecution arm. We hope it works. For, if people lose confidence in our systems, they may well call for the army, which, despite its declared commitment to democracy, may just respond.