Misreading Democracy

Feb 14, 2011 Editorial

President Jagdeo has just returned from his trip to India. While he was there he could not have missed the charges of corruption that have engulfed the Indian government for the past months over its allocation of its broadband spectrum.
This has already forced the resignation of one Minister and may well catapult the opposition into office at the next elections.
The scandal was precipitated because the government did not observe the minimum standards of transparency that is mandated in modern democratic governance. The officials in charge abused the process to favour companies; some that had no experience of capital. In the end the state lost at least US$40 billion. It is all coming out now as these things eventually will.
Now India is undoubtedly a very corrupt nation. According to Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) for 2010, it is ranked at 87 among 178 countries.
But President Jagdeo’ s response to questions that our newspaper had raised on his One Laptop Per Family (OLPF) initiative gives a clue as to why Guyana is rated as so much more corrupt than India, coming in at #116.
As we had editorialised when the program was first announced, the OLPF as part of an overall ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) strategy made sense for Guyana.
We were quite low on the technology frontier and ICT4D could catapult us over some intermediate competitors. But we were interested in how the OLPF program was going to be implemented.
As a newspaper of record, we owed the people of Guyana, not to mention the government itself, a scrutiny of how the allocated money would be spent. For a country as poor as ours, US$30 million was not to be sniffed at – even if some of it was a grant from China.
So we asked a few questions that we thought were very basic. What, for instance, were the specifications for the laptops? In this age where processing speeds of CPU’s, amount of RAM and hard disc storage varied so widely, how else could one know whether one was getting value for our money?
We hit a brick wall: no one knew – not even the Ministers of Finance that were asking Parliament to approve the appropriation for the first phase of the project. Were there bids out for this phase? Hemming and hawing. Why was the program being executed out of the Office of the President? Silence. We could not even pin down the head of the program for an interview.
Then came the President directly from his India trip, where we hoped he would have learnt something from the travails of the Indian government on the pitfalls of low transparency.
Rather than accepting that we were simply performing our job as a responsible member of the media by asking questions, he launched into a vehement attack He announced KN was now the PNC’s propaganda machine.
If, let’s say, we had overlooked the lack of transparency in the OLPF program, would he categorise us as the “PPP’s propaganda machine”? Is this what the role of the press in a democracy all about? That it can only be pro or anti-government or opposition?
The President profoundly misreads the demands that democracy places on the media in general and the press in particular.
Our job is to ferret out the details of how the servants of the people – the government that was elected by them – spend their (the people’s) hard earned money.
It is not the opposition that is in charge of the treasury at this time. If they were to take the reins of power they would be subjected to the same rigorous scrutiny.
The President also misreads the role that democracy has placed on him. It became obvious that most of the details of the OLPF program were in his head.
For instance, as to the specs, the source of the initial laptops distributed and the state of the bidding process for the remainder etc. In a democracy, a leader must delegate or else we have a dictatorship.

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