Barrow stakes reputation on clean government

In his interview this morning, Prime Minister Said Musa spoke at length about corruption in government, including measures his party would take to curb the practice if given another five years in power. Musa questioned the credibility of the Opposition’s zero tolerance platform, but it is a position that United Democratic Party Leader Dean Barrow defended with his political, and personal, reputation.

Dean Barrow, Leader, United Democratic Party

“We have set out this series of concrete measures that we propose to take. Now it is true we can get in there and go back on our word, but two things: first of all, you do that then you really, I think, have forfeited–certainly where I am concerned-I would have forfeited my entire political career. I would have forfeited any possible claim I might ever have to saying that I had tried to do some good as a politician in this country. And I am not about to do that.

The second thing, remember that we in terms of our economic platform, are insisting that there is an excellent possibility of securing a debt moratorium, a suspension of some of the debt service payments that we have to make annually on these foreign loans, especially the multilateral foreign loans. We are saying that there’s an excellent chance of being able to secure bailout funds from the multilateral financial institutions. But the pre-condition to that is transparency, accountability, democratic reform. Nobody in the outside world, nobody in the international financial community is going to have any tract with you unless you demonstrate that you are serious about the declared commitment to reform and to honesty and to transparency. So there really are two factors that in my view we can offer to persuade people that we are absolutely serious about the commitments that we are now publicly making.”

Barrow’s remarks were part of an extended interview we conducted with the U.D.P. leader several weeks ago.