Will the Integrity Chamber make a difference in Sint Maarten?

Dear Editor,

In the many conversations about the “Integrity Chamber” the majority of discussions are about the fact that this new chamber is apparently being imposed upon an unwilling Sint Maarten. But ironically there is very little conversation about whether it would indeed be an effective entity!

Seeing as though we are going to be paying for yet another entity then surely we should be considering it’s likely value, besides just agreeing to it just because the political judgement in the Netherlands is that we should have it and because it facilitates a one time reconstruction payment.

It seems to me that the majority of entities that we have adopted in the country model of government following the Dutch are not effective. At least not in the manner they are currently operating. Not necessarily because they are poorly designed, but the hard facts are they do not produce what they intended and the costs are disproportional to our tiny jurisdiction.

Our  Parliament’s functioning has clearly  attracted public attention due to the lack of legislative productivity. Many other expensive entities like the Council of Advice, Audit Chamber, Social Economic Council, and many supervisory boards are less well known and less considered by the public are also, in my view not as effective as they need to be. Not because they are poorly constituted but for a number of reasons they do not effectively function in our very young country in an environment where democracy and participation operate differently to where they were conceived.

We are taking all these models from a very well established democracy and parachuting them into a very different cultural environment and when they are not functioning, few people seem to be shocked. But our tiny population keeps paying the costs and suffering the ineffectiveness of these entities.

So when yet another proposed entity, the “Integrity Chamber“ becomes a political football that plays a major role in whether we can optimize reconstruction after the hurricane, then it strikes me as most peculiar that the potential effectiveness of this entity is not the subject of discussion. Does anybody believe that the Integrity Chamber will make a significant difference to Sint Maarten? After all the poorly functioning entities why would this one be different?

Robbie Ferron