EDITORIAL - PM should fire Azan

Never mind the sanitising pirouette by May Pen Mayor Scean Barnswell, there is still something rancid and vulgar about those shops at the Spaldings Market.

Indeed, if Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller is serious about accountable government, and of holding her ministers to the highest level of probity, Richard Azan should no longer find a place in her administration. He would have been shown the exit.

And firing Mr Azan would be a win-win for the prime minister. She would have made an example of behaviour that is unacceptable from ministers and removed someone who, with charity, we deem to be incompetent. He might well be worse.

Mr Barnswell, too, the chairman of the Clarendon Parish Council, can, on the evidence, make little claim to competence. He is clueless about what goes on in his council and then thrashes about after the fact.

Some background to this issue is useful.

John Bryant, who is said to be close to the governing People's National Party (PNP), got a contract to complete the refurbishing of the Spaldings Market. In the process, he built some wooden shops and rents them to vendors.

BEYOND THE SURFACE

That, in the face of it, is a good bit of enterprise. Except that the shops are in the market compound, on lands belonging to the parish council, which Mr Bryant neither bought, leased nor rented.

Further, the rent for the shops is collected at, or by someone at, the constituency office of Mr Azan, the minister of state for works and PNP MP for North West Clarendon. To any rational person, this has all the hallmarks of a conflict of interest, if not worse. But Mr Azan sees the fact that it has come to public attention as "dirty politics at play".

Yet, Mr Azan concedes that it was he who approached Mr Bryant about building the shops. He was aware of "the employee in my office … (being) involved, acting as a go-between and collecting rent on his (Mr Bryant's) behalf". That employee, according to Mr Bryant, was paid a commission for her efforts. Mr Bryant, however, says he is unaware of just how much Mr Azan knew.

LEFT IN THE DARK

Curiously, the Clarendon Parish Council had no knowledge of these arrangements. Indeed, it seems that Mr Bryant seems not to have been inquisitive about who paid for the construction of the shops, unless he assumed they were financed by council, in which case final approval of the budget would have been his responsibility.

It is perhaps to Mr Barnswell's credit that he eventually worked out that something was amiss - although after the matter had been referred to the auditor general.

It would have made sense that Mr Barnswell would have been miffed at what he, reasonably, interprets as a high-handed usurpation of the parish council's authority by Mr Azan. He now says he was misinterpreted and blames the amorphous Opposition for sowing mischief.

Mr Barnswell may have conned us into respecting him, and might have even gained his own, if he pretended to maintain his anger at those we feel "can flout the law and do what they can without going through the proper channel".

Our advice: He and Mr Azan should don tutus and dance on feeding troughs.

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