AFRA RAYMOND
“Ambiguity and silence (are) the enemy of ethics and integrity.”¬ – Richard Bistrong
“‘Manufactured consent’ is supported by ‘…effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalised assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion….’” – Noam Chomsky
The Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Property Act was fully proclaimed on April 26, which makes that one of our republic’s truly historic days by any measure.
I welcomed the decision to proclaim the act, since even with the damaging suite of 2020 exemptions, this is a tremendous step in the right direction of accountability, transparency and good governance so that we can achieve improved value for money in our public affairs. The private sector civil society groups wrote and lobbied for this important law, so this is the result of long-term, collective effort. We owe serious appreciation to those who persisted when this was a faraway vision.
That said, there are two important outstanding issues to be tackled at the outset: the reason for this delayed proclamation; and the proper appointment of an effective regulator to run the Office of Procurement Regulation (OPR).
On the first issue, this was Act No 1 of 2015, which was amended three times by the current PNM administration, with its enabling regulations approved by Parliament in February 2022. With all the legal stages completed, the implementation of this important new law was delayed for a further year by the exchange between the Attorney General and the Chief Justice. On April 12, 2022, AG Armour wrote to the CJ to request a checklist for implementation of the act, to which the CJ replied on May 25, 2022 with the Judiciary’s 29-page commentary.
[caption id="attachment_1017161" align="alignnone" width="1021"] Attorney General Reginald Armour SC. -[/caption]
On June 22, AG Armour hosted his first media conference to discuss the Judiciary’s “traffic-stopping” comments on the act and went further to advise that those concerns would have to be addressed before the act could be proclaimed. After I applied to both the AGLA and the Judiciary for that exchange of correspondence which was delaying the act, the Judiciary published its 29-page commentary on October 5, 2022.
Most of the commentary was devoted to criticisms of the act, which were not only out of order for an existing law, but the criticisms were seriously misplaced and entirely unsupported.
In my view, that exchange embodied a constitutional imbroglio, in that the AG was accepting the Judiciary’s unfounded criticisms of an important new law which had been passed by the Legislature. It seemed clear to me that the separation of powers was being violated. In these pages I challenged the Judiciary to either substantiate its critique or withdraw those in toto.
The AG insisted that the Judiciary had identified 19 serious areas of concern which would need to be resolved before the act could be p
