Last Tues­day in the Sen­ate, In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Rolph Bal­go­b­in told po­lit­i­cal par­ties to "put up or shut up" about cam­paign fi­nance re­form. This mat­ter has been talked about for more years than one can re­mem­ber. The ba­sic is­sue is that the ex­ist­ing elec­tion rules per­tain to the ex­pens­es of in­di­vid­ual can­di­dates, but do not cov­er the ex­pens­es of the var­i­ous po­lit­i­cal par­ties.

In this coun­try, po­lit­i­cal par­ties are not reg­is­tered as com­pa­nies, so there are no re­port­ing re­quire­ments as would ob­tain with nor­mal busi­ness­es. How­ev­er, the par­ties all re­ceive large do­na­tions in var­i­ous forms at elec­tion time which are de­signed to as­sist their elec­toral for­tunes.

Where all of this gets murky is in the post-elec­tion pe­ri­od when al­le­ga­tions are made about po­lit­i­cal in­vestors be­ing re­ward­ed with state con­tracts in re­turn for their elec­toral fi­nan­cial sup­port. Po­lit­i­cal par­ties are not go­ing to open up their records for pub­lic scruti­ny for every­one to see who made do­na­tions to them in elec­tion pe­ri­ods.The de­bate is one in which op­po­si­tion par­ties make al­le­ga­tions against gov­ern­ing par­ties about re­ward­ing their fi­nan­cial back­ers.

How­ev­er, when op­po­si­tion par­ties be­come gov­ern­ing par­ties, they en­gage in ex­act­ly the same be­hav­iour. This al­lows the vi­cious cy­cle to con­tin­ue. In oth­er words, an­gels will be­come dev­ils and dev­ils will be­come an­gels.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers