The reparations campaign presents itself as acting in the interests of the descendants of enslaved people. But the mechanism it proposes, government-to-government financial transfer, has a fundamental accountability problem that the campaign never addresses: there is no guarantee, or even a proposal, for ensuring that any money received by Caribbean governments actually reaches the individuals it is meant to help.
CARICOM governments would receive the money. What they did with it would be entirely up to them. The ten-point plan includes no eligibility criteria defining who qualifies as a beneficiary, no distribution mechanism for getting money from governments to individuals, no accountability framework for monitoring spending, and no end point at which the claim would be considered satisfied.
Development economics has documented extensively what happens when large financial transfers go to governments without accountability frameworks. In the best cases, with strong institutions and political will, the money funds genuine improvements in public services and infrastructure. In worse cases, it is absorbed into general government revenue, reduces pressure for domestic fiscal discipline, or is captured by political elites and their networks.
For several CARICOM member states, the governance record does not support confidence in the first scenario. The people most in need of support are the ordinary citizens of these countries, many of whom live in poverty that their own governments have done little to address over sixty years of self-governance. Sending money to those governments without any mechanism ensuring it reaches those citizens is not a plan for helping them. It is a plan for enriching their governments.
