Editorial | Revive impeachment debate

Former Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s reminder that the impeachment bill he first tabled a decade and a half ago remains in legislative limbo and deserves a response from Prime Minister Andrew Holness on the current position on the issue.

The idea is one of the several governance-related proposals on which Dr Holness campaigned ahead his Jamaica Labour Party’s return to office that have seen little or no movement in the decade since he has been in office. Term limits for prime ministers, for instance, is another of them.

Mr Golding’s revival of the impeachment question as well as his separate recent intervention on the value of citizens’ oversight of government are likely to be good for the confidence of good-governance campaigners who often fall under searing criticism for public officials who feel themselves victimised.

But more importantly, it will, hopefully, stir Prime Minister Holness to seriously engage  the political opposition in the constitutional reform dialogue he promised at his swearing-in ceremony after last September’s general election. Dr Holness has strongly implied that he would have direct talks with the Opposition Leader Mark Golding to break the logjam on constitutional issues but then delegated the project to his legal and constitutional affairs minister, Delroy Chuck.

The prime minister should, as a confidence-building measure, urgently reconvene the Vale Royal-style direct talks between himself and the opposition leader, which would establish a framework for further negotiations.

The proposed impeachment law, under which legislators and some other public officials could be removed from office for egregious behavior, has resonance at this time for two reasons.

IMPROVE GOVERNANCE

First, Mr Golding, the former prime minister, characterised it in an interview with a New York radio station that caters to the Jamaican diaspora as the reform that was most likely to improve governance and accountability in Jamaica.

Second, not only is there the existence of the bill tabled by the former prime minister in 2011, months before his government imploded, an updated version was laid by Mark Golding in 2021 in the midst of the George Wright affair. 

At the time of the Mark Golding bill, there were questions about whether a man captured on video beating a woman with a stool was Mr Wright.  Mr Wright neither confirmed nor denied that he was the person in the video but, strategically, temporarily resigned from the JLP and took a leave of absence from Parliament, supposedly to deal with personal matters.

Mark Golding’s bill was not brought up for debate before the end of the last Parliament. There is no indication that it has been revived since last September's general election.

Of his effort in what he felt was potentially among the most critical pieces of legislation for good governance, Bruce Gilding said: “I wasn’t able to get that (the impeachment bill) passed.

“Although that was a commitment that (Prime Minister) Andrew (Holness) had given, I think during the 2015 general election campaign, that still has not been done. So that’s one important thing.”

ON THE AGENDA

The question of the right to impeach legislators, which would require amendments to Jamaica’s Constitution, has been on the agenda for over three and a half decades.

Indeed, a 1992 report on the idea for the Michael Manley administration by a committee chaired by the late sociologist and pollster Professor Carl Stone recommended, among other things, the right of constituents to  recall parliamentarians but with safeguards to prevent its partisan abuse.  The proposal had the support of seven in 10 Jamaicans.

The bills by the two Goldings built on the ideas of the Stone Committee, laid out specific regimes for Parliament to pursue complaints against its members or public officials, and set out the structure of the tribunal that would hear cases against alleged transgressors.

 Under Bruce Golding’s version of the matters for which legislators could face impeachment were

• persistent neglect of duties as MPs and Senators. 
•  corruption. 
• abuse of official authority. 
• deliberately misleading or intentionally abusing the privileges of Parliament or
•  behaviour so serious in nature as to “render the holder of the office unfit to continue to hold that or any office, the holder of which performs a public function”.

Broadly, Mark Golding’s bill covered those grounds, but on its face, would also embrace actions that didn’t relate to officials' public functions. 

Like Bruce Golding, The Gleaner’s Editorial Board appreciates that legislators and public officials, even honest ones, may find public oversight and demands for transparency intrusive and distracting while they attempt to do jobs with urgency.

But as the former prime minister noted: “It may cause discomfort; it may cause you to divert from other things that you want to do; but there is no alternative to that … .”

After all, as he reminded, public officials deal with taxpayers' money. They are not drawing cheques on their personal accounts.