Political corruption subject of public presentation
(CNS): A Leading Caribbean Scholar will be presenting a public lecture on Thursday at the UCCI about political corruption in the region. The presentation by Professor Trevor Munroe, one of the Caribbean’s leading public scholars, marks the launch of the university’s Distinguished Public Lecture Series. The opener will see Munroe addressing a subject that is becoming an increasing public concern across the Caribbean, including here in Cayman. Entitled: ‘Political Corruption in the Caribbean – Where to from Here?’, Munroe is expected to offer a riveting and enlightening presentation.
The lecture series is being presented under the patronage of the University Board Chair, Berna Cummings. Officials said the series aims to bring the best thinking and ideas on a range of issues and subject areas affecting the Cayman Islands and the general Caribbean directly to the people. It is hoped that this will help to form synergistic networks among members of the UCCI, the wider community, and various organisations and businesses.
UCCI said the presentations will be penetrating, rigorous, deep, and will present novel interpretations of important issues and themes relevant to the socio-psychology, history, culture, sociality and economics of the Cayman Islands. This first lecture will also serve to kick off preparations for UCCI’s Caribbean Conference slated for March with the theme, “Towards a Corruption-Free Caribbean: Ethics, Values, and Morality.
Since 2011, Professor Munroe has been Executive Director of Jamaica’s National Integrity Action Limited, a not for profit NGO dedicated to the building of integrity and the combat of corruption in Jamaica on a non-partisan basis. Prior to this he directed the National Integrity Action Forum a coalition of leaders of public sector anti-corruption agencies, a 2-year project launched in 2009 and supported by USAID. In 2012, Professor Munroe was appointed an individual member of Transparency International, the only such person from the Caribbean, one among 27 in the world.
As a scholar, he was promoted to Professor of Government and Politics at the UWI in 1998 and appointed founding Director of the Centre for Leadership and Governance in 2006. He had previously served as Head of the Mona Campus’ Department of Government. He is the author or co-author of eight (8) books primarily on issues of Caribbean democratic governance. His 1972 book on Jamaican politics remains the authoritative work on Jamaica’s transition to Independence.
Hehas written extensively on issues of corruption and governance, including authoring Transparency International’s National Integrity System country studies of Jamaica, the Caribbean and, most recently, the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Professor Munroe, a Jamaican Rhodes Scholar, who attained his doctorate at Oxford University, after 1st class honours degree at UWI, has received many academic awards, including the UWI Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence, The Mona Campus Principal’s Award for Research, the Honorary Doctorate in Social Sciences from Florida International University the first from the English-speaking Caribbean and taken up Fulbright Fellowships at Harvard University in the United States.
He served as a Senator in the Jamaican Parliament between 1998 and 2007, championing integrity building measures and playing an active role on Parliamentary Committees dealing with corruption prevention. For many years, he served on the Executive of Jamaica’s private sector led Think Tank and as a Director of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions, having himself co-founded the UAWU, one of Jamaica’s major trade unions. Dr Munroe has special expertise in building labour-management partnerships, having played a lead role in forging the accord between the trade unions and the trans-national corporations in the Bauxite Alumina sector in the late 1990s and led the team responsible for building trust amongst sector participants in the Partnership for Transformation chaired in 2011 by Jamaica’s Prime Minister.
Category: Local News
Is it a coincidence that Mac will miss this as he is in London spending our money?
Can we make it mandatory for our politicians to attend?
UCCI should award our Premier with an Honorary Doctorate in Political Corruption Studies. Politicians in other countries get honorary degrees all the time. It’s not fair to let Mac’s talents go unrecognized and the Lord knows he’s earned it. “Eternally Honorable Doctor” has a nice ring to it.
Beta not say nothing bad about Mac or last time he talk in cayman……bobo.
He gonna get his papers took away. This is serious. We is good people. Mac save dis country.
It will be interesting to see how many of our Jamaican entrepreneurs who came here in the 70s and 80s will be there to hear Dr Munroe speak. He is indeed a brilliant scholar who was in the 60s/70s (and possibly still is) very left wing and a massive supporter of Michael Manley and his admonition to those Jamaicans of entrepreneurial class who did not like Manley's flirting with the socialist policies of Cuba and the now hopelessly discredited Julius Nyrere of Tanzania (Mwalimu-Teacher- as Jamaicans were supposed to cravenly call him) to get on the 8 flights a day to Miami (which they dutifully did) plus a significant number to Cayman, where, God bless them, they opened car dealerships, furniture stores, building contractor businesses, bathroom onyx and marble appliances, Chinese restaurants, doctors' offices and other enterprises and stimulated the Caymanian economy. Jamaica meanwhile plunged into recession, currency controls and dollar collapse following the catastrophic departure of the middle class with its brains and money. Some would say it still has not recovered. Little will be said by Roy Bodden or anyone else about Dr Munroe's activities in these days; happily he is now championing more solid governance issues and no doubt he learned much from Jamaica's disastrous flirtation with Cuba and Tanzania which made the rich richer (but abroad in other countries) and the poor poorer in Jamaica.
You seem to know quite a bit about the Manley years but you must also admit that Cayman benefited from it. Also I don't hear you saying anything about the fact that a lot of what Manley tried to introduce was also practiced by others (like grow more and import less) but then you seem to be partisan in your comments.
15;53, read my post again. One of the points I made was that Cayman benefitted from the stimulus given our economy by those fleeing Manley. As for your comments about Manley's grow more, import less, I accept you are quite correct on that one. It was an excellent stance for him to take and it worked and is still benefitting Jamaica today. It's his other nonsense that brought the place to where it is today. I'm not partisan (I'm not Jamaican), but Manley's ghost has much to answer for. But then Seaga's lot are no better.
Bet all UDP MLA's will be missing along with a number of Contractors and Developers 🙂
Could we arrange a special lecture for our MLA group?
There goes Roy Bodden Job… ahh welll…. just another day in Paradise
Thank you UCCI for being brave to bring a famous corruption fighter such as Dr. Trevor Munroe to Grand Cayman.
Let us hope that all of us who know the damaging effects of corruption and are sick and tired of paying ever increasing taxes which are nothing more than allowing "legal" robbers to take money from us to put in the pockets of corrupt politicians and their business friends in sweetheart deals.
Friends I dunno about you but I am fed up of our corrupt leadership. Let us fight corruption together.
When this Dr. Munroe's anti-corruption lecture starts at 6 PM on Thursday at UCCI my friends and I will be in the trees at UCCI, not to see who attends the lecture, we want to see who is missing!
We know the ones who need to be there, the ones who need to change their corrupting ways, the ones who need to turn away from their corrupting practices.
Ching-Ching
He must have heard this is a great place for reserarch
I had the privilege of attending a function in Jamaica where Professor Monroe was the guest speaker as he spoke with civilians and police officers alike about corruption- This opportunity should not be missed by anyone; the professor is an awesome speaker. I hope I get the opportunity to listen to him again.
Attention Atttention McKeeva Bush!!!!!!!!!
It is excellent to have this topic discussed publicly.
My concern is that some politicians may expect a "how to" exposition and others will think that they are the real experts.