#BTEditorial – In praise of whistleblowers

It is one of the sardonic ironies of Barbadian life to hear the clamour for investigative journalism. A sober, more honest self-assessment should be expressed thus: “We want investigative journalism in Barbados. Just don’t investigate me or mine.”

Such laments at the paucity of the kind of accountability journalism that breaks in the metropolitan countries with stories that topple giants and shield innocents ignore the very culture from which they spring.

In the United States, for example, in addition to the long-standing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), there is a culture of speaking truth to power, not merely by journalists shielded by newspaper proprietors with intestinal fortitude, but by the average citizen. So-called sunshine legislation opens the deliberations of city councils and school boards to public attendance and scrutiny. Unlike our culture, officials – even those in the firing line of critics – do not reflexively evade the media.

But more often than not, North Americans, especially but not exclusively, have no qualms about going public with their pain, anguish or quest for justice.

And ever so often, civil servants and some private sector people who see something, say something – and the law has been developed to protect these whistleblowers.

It is these figures, known to the system but shielded from the public, who raise the red flag on waste, abuse and fraud in government and business.

In corporate America, were it not for biochemist Jeffrey Wigand, the tobacco industry would have doubtless gone on addicting millions through liberal sales of a product which, when used precisely as the manufacturer intends, kills the user. He blew the proverbial whistle on active measures to bury evidence of cancer-causing smoking’s addictive power.

And now, for the third time in 150 years, an American presidency is imperilled by a formal charge of high crimes and misdemeanours made by low-level functionaries and now laid by the US House of Representatives.

The impeachment of Donald J Trump is the fruit of a whistleblower’s original complaint of something rotten in a presidential call during which the American seeks a thing of value to him personally and politically from his Ukrainian counterpart, in return for the delivery of promised military aid and an important White House visit as unambiguous gestures of support in Ukraine’s hot war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Hours of depositions and public hearings later, a 658-page report led to a vote by the lower chamber of the U.S. Congress to submit the 45th President of the United States to trial by the upper chamber, the Senate, to be presided over by Chief Justice John Roberts.

Despite the deeply partisan rancour, media ranting and raving and presidential rabble-rousing, constitutionally prescribed functions, supported by statute law, historical precedent and parliamentary rules of order, have been triggered to bring to account the head of state for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. All because a whistleblower saw something and said something.

Here at home, while successive administrations declare then dither on the passage of whistleblower protection legislation and other anti-corruption laws, we have had to rely on the significant intestinal fortitude of brave Barbadians, ever fearful of social exclusion and material deprivation under the banner of “victimisation” to blow the proverbial whistle as a check on injustice.

It is those individuals who came forward to this newspaper over the course of this year to whom we extend gratitude on behalf of a nation that ought to be more grateful.

In particular, we honour Janice Harris, a former maid at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital invalided out of the public service, who came to this newspaper seeking her reduced pension of $628.62 after her pension as cut back in June to a mere $47.51.

The move led to her protesting at the gates of Parliament. In turn, Prime Minister Mottley ordered the restoration of benefits to close to 200 ex-public servants declared medically unfit who had been deprived of their pension as the Government capriciously ruled their receipt of pension and invalidity benefit as double-dipping.

But all is not lost in the cause of bringing unfairness and injustice to light. This year saw the reactivation of a vitally important parliamentary watchdog, the House Public Accounts Committee, currently engaged in accounting for missing figures at the state bus company which daily struggles to move thousands of Barbadians on an incredibly shrunken fleet.

We can but hope that checks and balances on waste, fraud, abuse, malfeasance and misbehaviour in public office will not merely be the tools of partisan retribution and political score-settling but the permanent product of the sobering revelation that there are real, tangible consequences of corruption on our daily lives.

But until our lawmakers provide legal protections, investigative powers and detection resources – or parliamentary recall as in neighbouring Trinidad and Tobago – we urge prospective whistleblowers, be ye not dismayed. For the sake of a better nation, if you see something, you must say something.