Whistle Blowers
On a soporific afternoon this month, sitting in my car in traffic in Port of Spain, my radio tuned to the BBC, I was thinking of the talk I’d attended at the chamber earlier in the day. In 2000 Wendy Addison blew the whistle to expose corruption on two joint chief executives leading to the collapse of LeisureNet, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE). Initially, she didn’t speak up. But then, it was as if something else had taken over within herself, and she made an anonymous report to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.
That one act of hers snowballed into among the biggest corporate disasters in South African history. Wendy Addison was hounded out of her country, lost her job, and eventually, in exile in England, unable to get a job, began begging on the streets of London. At question time, a Trini executive, always aware of the bottom line, joked that the lesson is that whistle-blowers end up begging on the streets.
Addison agreed she lost everything—the life most people want—the executive job, the posh car, the fancy home, the expensive entertainment. She would do it again, she said.
“Silence has a bigger cost than speaking up. That cost is a shame, a lifetime of regret, a cost to society and erosion of the soul. As corrosive as not speaking up when a woman is battered. A child is bullied. A poor person exploited. Injustice. Collective corrosion of what it means to be human.” I was on the streets, begging, stripped naked of my entire societal framework, in tatters.
Even then I believed that true courage is when you feel fear and anxiety and still speak up.”
After 11 years of trials and appeals, the two joint chief executives were found guilty of an elaborate fraudulent scheme and were incarcerated.
“People saw something in me. They helped me. They saw that these conversations lift us all up. Society and the individual.”
I saw it too. That joy on her face is not something money can buy. Just then I heard the voice of journalist and writer Hussain Zaidi over the BBC. I turned up the volume. Zaidi is arguably India’s most famous investigative crime journalist reporting on the Bombay Mafia with its long tradition in Hashish trafficking, protection rackets, extortion, illegal gambling, gold smuggling, and contract killings.
He was telling the BBC reporter of his most trying moment as a crime reporter in the 80s when he was hot on the trail of India’s biggest Don, Dawood Ibrahim.
“I had a call on my land line. A man’s voice was saying ‘You better stop doing what you are doing. I know you have a son. You will regret it if you don’t stop investigating this story.’ At that moment I felt my blood freeze. I thought I would get a stroke and die. My son. My life. I did something reckless. I can’t believe how it happened and why. I said, ‘Perhaps you don’t have the full information on my son. My son is six years old. His name is Ali, and he is in class x, in school x on this street.’ The man was speechless.
I could hear him, just breathing for a long time. He hung up eventually. I thought I was being reckless but my human moral intuitive compass was right. You cannot admit you are weak or scared of powerful people and their wrong-doing. They will capitalise on your fear.”
As a small country, we are governed by fear. As a result, our corruption index is high, our ideology based on political or social patronage, our habit of crime and violence starts in dark corners of our homes, uncontrollable. It gets worse when people don’t speak out. Just then I saw that government withdrew a controversial proposed amendment to the Freedom of Information Act after the Media Association of T&T alerted the public to its ramifications.
Courageous conversations are happening—in the media, in the police service, in a government, in public and private spaces. Each of us, you and I, must bring our own courage to our conversations, be part of the transformation they bring to our lives.