The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

It was disappointing that your article in Tribune Business on the 26th April (‘Not a Single Bribe Demand is Probed’) while quoting heavily from a group claiming to be Transparency International’s local affiliate, contained not one single reference to The Bahamas’ ranking in that group’s all important Corruption Perception Index.

For the record, The Bahamas consistently ranks in the top 30 least corrupt out of 180 countries monitored and frequently trades places with Barbados as 1st or 2nd least corrupt in the Caribbean region. It has never not been in the top two.

For a local affiliate of TN to give broad (and heavily value-laden) interpretations of the results of a barometer survey of 1,000 Bahamians last year, without reference to the larger context provided by the CPI, was amateurish to say the least, and (in light of the current news cycle) suggests a hysterical and bandwagon approach to matters that require fair and scientific treatment.

For instance, to state that one in ten Bahamians “admits” to paying bribes implies that some of the other 90 percent are lying and infers both that 10% is a high number in the global context (it is not) and that this factor represents a meaningful and broad picture of overall corruption.

For the local affiliate to then use the findings of this barometer survey to suggest that we are between Trinidad and Jamaica in some important sense is simply nonsensical. Jamaica ranks 68th in the world and Trinidad 77th in the CPI, as against The Bahamas at 28th. Both are noticeably far more corrupt than The Bahamas, as the CPI adequately reflects, but the local affiliate’s eloquent ruminations on the subject do not.

One reassuring consequence of all the fuss about corruption in The Bahamas has been that it affirms that Bahamians often do not even know what extreme corruption looks or feels like. On my first visit to Peru (the place our Prime Minister chose to get up a fortnight ago and proclaim his own country a hotbed of corruption), I learned that the driver of the official tour bus that picked me and many others up from the airport, did not himself have a driver’s license despite 20 plus years on the job. A respected professional with a Ministry of Tourism name tag, he and the vast majority of his colleagues found it cheaper to simply bribe traffic police than to pay for driving lessons.

On my second trip, less than ten minutes from the airport we had to swerve around the dead body of a pregnant woman, in a lake of blood, who had been ejected from a public bus in an accident. The bus driver (who no doubt substituted police bribes for driving lessons, too) had fled the scene on foot. If that is daily life in Peru (and many other countries) one can only imagine what they think of The Bahamas when they hear us describe the “corrupt” little country we live in.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

May 11, 2018.