At this point, it could only be hubris and/or obduracy, rather than good sense, why the Government continues to resist the reinstitution of an independent political ombudsman.
Over 70 per cent of adult Jamaicans don’t agree with the administration’s position. And even if it clamoured for its best interpretation of the data, the figure would be over 60 per cent.
Neither can the Government, using the argument of the pending general election, claim it to be too late to reinstate an ombudsman, unless Prime Minister Andrew Holness intends to announce the date of the poll and dissolve Parliament before Tuesday, when the House of Representatives sits, or on Friday, when the Senate should be in session.
Which seems unlikely, since Prime Minister Holness is committed to hosting the annual mid-year summit of Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders in Montego Bay on July 6-8 and wouldn’t want to be entertaining his fellow heads of government in the midst of a full-blown political campaign.
In any event, the formal removal of the independent political ombudsman and legislatively turning that office’s functions over to the Electoral Commission of Jamaica (ECJ) happened not long before the February 2024 municipal elections.
So, the sensible thing for the Government to do now is to have Delroy Chuck, the justice minister, go to the House at its sitting on Tuesday with a bill to repeal last year’s amendments to the Political Ombudsman (Interim) Act, and to reinstate the provisions that were previously removed. The Standing Orders would be suspended to allow the bill to go through all its readings and passage at the sitting, which wouldn’t be unusual for Jamaica’s legislature.
The Senate would approve the old/new bill at its sitting on Friday, having it ready for assent by the governor general, Sir Patrick Allen, by sunset that same day. Or, the Senate could be called to a sitting on an earlier day.
SECONDED TO THE POST
If there are concerns that there isn’t a sitting, stand-alone, independent political ombudsman to assume the reconstituted chair, the person at the electoral office, who has been assigned by the ECJ commissioners to receive, and presumably lead investigations of, complaints of breaches of the Political Code of Conduct, could be seconded to the post temporarily.
Conversely, a Jamaican of high integrity, with the appropriate temperament – of which there are many – could be tapped for the post on an interim basis. This person wouldn’t need, as it were, to reinvent the wheel. It is assumed that during the hiatus, when the ombudsman’s chair was left vacant, the entire office wasn’t dismantled and any investigator in its staff let go. Further, the systems and staff established at the electoral office could be subsumed by the independent ombudsman.
Jamaica finds itself in this dilemma over the status of the political ombudsman, with the public’s resentment that the office no longer stands independently on its own being the result of an unforced and clearly predictable folly on the part of the Government.
The political ombudsman was an important element of Jamaica’s political architecture; one of the institutions that had its genesis in the search for solutions to the island’s political turbulence of the 1970s and 1980s. It played a mostly unobtrusive, and largely underrated role, in helping to build confidence in Jamaica’s elections.
Primarily, the political ombudsman policed adherence to a code of conduct signed between the island’s two major political parties and their candidates, committing them to avoid the kinds of speech or actions that lead to tensions or incite tension between their supporters, which was an almost default feature of Jamaica’s elections in 1970s and ’80s.
The office can act on complaints or institute investigations at its own behest, with the power to operate in a quasi-judicial fashion, including compelling witnesses to attend its hearings and facing the potential legal peril of perjury for failing to tell the truth.
PAPER TIGER
But while the Political Ombudsman can issue censure statements, the office has no power to enforce its recommendations or findings, leading some critics to brand it a paper tiger. This was one of the arguments used by the Government when it initially failed to appoint a successor to the previous stand-alone ombudsman, Donna Parchment-Brown, when her seven-year tenure ended in November, 2022.
That perceived weakness notwithstanding, it is this newspaper’s view that the voice of the Office of the Political Ombudsman carried moral weight, acting as a restraint on the worst impulses of politicians.
In the face of complaints, the Government, after more than a year, brought back the political ombudsman – in fashion.
Ignoring the advice of a wide range of civic organisations and influential individuals, the Government decided to collapse the political ombudsman, which essentially deals with the moral and ethical issues of politics, into the ECJ, whose primary focus is the nuts-and-bolts of elections.
Notably, it is the ECJ, that acts “indivisibly” as the ombudsman, although four of the nine voting members directly represent the political parties and are likely to have sharply divergent interests when disputes arise.
The structure is clearly unwieldy and inefficient, which perhaps contributed to the slow pace at which the ECJ put in place a mechanism merely to register complaints. It is not clear whether the members have sat as yet as a tribunal of the ombudsman – a prospect the public obviously doesn’t relish.
A May/June Don Anderson poll for the RJRGLEANER Communications Group found that 71 per cent of Jamaicans felt that there should be an independent ombudsman to monitor political misbehaviour.
When the question was shifted to whether the ECJ should be the ombudsman, over 63 per cent of the respondents were negative. Significantly, only 12 per cent agreed with the ombudsman being subsumed by the ECJ.
The message to the Government is clear: bring back the ombudsman.
