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Jamaica's losing battle with corruption
Published: Sunday | March 8, 2009
Ian Boyne, Contributor
Jamaica ranks 96 out of 180 countries in Transparency International's 2008 Corruption Perception Index, with only Guyana, Haiti and the Dominican Republic ranking lower in the region. Between 2006 and 2007 alone - just one year - Jamaica fell from 61st to 84th place, and last year we tumbled even a farther. Jamaica gets only a four out of a possible 10 in the grading.
Referring to the fog from the Riverton City landfill which sometimes envelops the Coperate Area, a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) corruption report on Jamaica last year says Jamaica is "covered by a blanket of corruption". According to statistics from one 2006 study, an alarming 70 per cent of Jamaican youths between ages 18 and 25 acquiesce with corrupt practices, and 57 per cent justify "doing the runnings" as a necessity. A stunning 96 per cent of Jamaicans consider corruption to be pervasive in Jamaica.
In the critical area of trust and social capital, a University of the West Indies (UWI) study in 2006 found that few countries on Earth score as low as Jamaica. Only 14 per cent of Jamaicans agree that "most people can be trusted" in Jamaica, with the USAID study commenting that "not even Kenya's ethnically divided and violent polity scored as low".
Corruption has reached such endemic proportions in Jamaica and is so all-pervasive that a Don Anderson poll found in July last year that 57 per cent of Jamaicans saw only crime and violence ahead of corruption as "the main thing wrong with Jamaica".
"We are now at a serious crossroads with this corruption issue," Professor Trevor Munroe, head of the Centre for Leadership and Governance at the UWI, told a group of opinion leaders summoned last week to discuss corruption.
http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/glean...us/focus1.html
Published: Sunday | March 8, 2009
Ian Boyne, Contributor
Jamaica ranks 96 out of 180 countries in Transparency International's 2008 Corruption Perception Index, with only Guyana, Haiti and the Dominican Republic ranking lower in the region. Between 2006 and 2007 alone - just one year - Jamaica fell from 61st to 84th place, and last year we tumbled even a farther. Jamaica gets only a four out of a possible 10 in the grading.
Referring to the fog from the Riverton City landfill which sometimes envelops the Coperate Area, a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) corruption report on Jamaica last year says Jamaica is "covered by a blanket of corruption". According to statistics from one 2006 study, an alarming 70 per cent of Jamaican youths between ages 18 and 25 acquiesce with corrupt practices, and 57 per cent justify "doing the runnings" as a necessity. A stunning 96 per cent of Jamaicans consider corruption to be pervasive in Jamaica.
In the critical area of trust and social capital, a University of the West Indies (UWI) study in 2006 found that few countries on Earth score as low as Jamaica. Only 14 per cent of Jamaicans agree that "most people can be trusted" in Jamaica, with the USAID study commenting that "not even Kenya's ethnically divided and violent polity scored as low".
Corruption has reached such endemic proportions in Jamaica and is so all-pervasive that a Don Anderson poll found in July last year that 57 per cent of Jamaicans saw only crime and violence ahead of corruption as "the main thing wrong with Jamaica".
"We are now at a serious crossroads with this corruption issue," Professor Trevor Munroe, head of the Centre for Leadership and Governance at the UWI, told a group of opinion leaders summoned last week to discuss corruption.
http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/glean...us/focus1.html