The planned Inter-faith channel will make all religious organisations subservient

Feb 16, 2011 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I refer to a letter from Mrs Patricia Gonzalez, captioned, “An open letter to President Jagdeo”. I would like to congratulate Mrs Gonzalez on a well-researched and well informed letter, and frankly it bears a close resemblance to a letter which I might have written on this matter. Keep it up Mrs. Gonzalez.
I would like to re-state for the public’s convenience the essence of Mrs Gonzalez’s missive with my comments as I see them.
1.  Trinity broadcasting was removed from the air after seven years under what can only be described as the most suspicious circumstances pointing to a collusion of several parties.
2. Mrs Gonzalez is right; President Jagdeo, a well known micro manager, control freak and dictator, is using this interfaith channel, which the taxpayers in this country will have to pay for, but which by the very nature of its structure will make all religious organisations subservient to the executive in order to get airtime.
I am positive that, and Mrs Gonzalez agrees, it will not be in relation to their percentage of the population. I have no doubt that part of the deal will be that this interfaith channel will not allow any condemnation of Mr. Jagdeo or his government. The distribution of religion in this country is very much as Mrs Gonzalez describes it as follows: Christian 54%; Hindu 36%; Muslim 9%; other 1%. etc. The religious bodies will never agree to this and will want equal time, but since the Christians do out number all other religions, the fair thing will be that they get 54% of the air time.
Anyone wants to bet that this will not happen?
Mrs Gonzalez is apprehensive on this point and I truly believe that she is right, in which case I am expecting that all Christian organisations unless they will be allocated time according to this formula, withdraw from any interfaith channel. Demand your own channel when the Broadcast Authority is formed, and you will get it.
In Trinidad the Maha Sabha was refused a radio licence by the Manning Government and after the matter was taken to the courts it was given a licence.
3. Removing Trinity from the air in the manner in which it was done, not only removed Trinity but VCT 28 as well since we were being victimised by the government because of our views and were experiencing severe economic pressures. So with the removal of the Trinity income to VCT 28 the station fell shortly thereafter.
It also left thousands of people in this country feeling the way Mrs Gonzalez did and I quote her “the pain, the bruising and the wounding that the tearing and the ripping away of TBN by the state has brought on Christians. How we have lamented to each other about this injustice”.
These are the essential points brought out by Mrs Gonzalez to which I would like to add the following, we [Broadcasters] and since I represent Trinity in Guyana I am still a broadcaster, will not allow any station to come on the air until the Broadcast Authority is formed, we will seek an injunction stopping the issuing of any broadcast licence including Mr. Luncheon’s learning channel for schools, if anyone in this government seeks to give a broadcast licence to any person or organisation in the absence of a Broadcast Authority we will end up in court.
My reason for saying this is that I was denied expansion [not a new licence] to the Essequibo and to Linden in 2002 and was refused a frequency to broadcast Trinity in this country and C.N. Sharma has consistently been denied expansion to Berbice under the guise that no one will be given a broadcast licence in this country, as agreed by the Bipartisan Board on Broadcasting which gave this decision in 2001, until the Broadcast Authority is formed and Mr. Jagdeo has consistently declined to form an impartial Broadcast Authority for 10 years, a gross violation of his dialogue with Mr. Hoyte.
In her letter Mrs Gonzalez refers to Mr. Juan Edghill’s appearance on channel 11. I am glad that I did not witness this spectacle or I may have damaged my television set. This man is holding a questionable position since Parliament has not agreed to Edghill’s continued occupancy of the chair of the Ethnic Relations Commission and has been labelled by Mr. Hamilton Green as a house slave to Mr. Jagdeo.
And it is in my opinion that he is presiding over an organisation which is carrying out a controlled deprivation of rights against the Afro Guyanese in this nation, his own Ethnic Relations Commission has identified clear areas where Afro and mixed Guyanese as well as the Amerindians are being badly treated in this country by the PPP.
The researches of Drs Melissa Ifill and Pamela Rodney attest to this. It is in my commentary, “Total Discrimination” aired in 2009.  Check it out on my website www.tonyvguy.com
I also want to advise Edghill that since returning to Guyana I have been informed that he has been inviting broadcasters to attend ERC meetings at which he has been advocating rules for their broadcasts which amounts to a deprivation of their right to freedom of speech. This impostor seems to be completely unaware, as does Mr. Jagdeo, that in 1966 this country signed the UNITED NATIONS declaration of civil and political rights.
As signatories to this convention the government was obligated to place within its laws articles protecting freedom of speech, which it did in the 1980 constitution, but it seems that the ERC and Jagdeo are now seeking to suppress free speech in this election year.
It is OK for him to go on channel 11 and outrage poor Mrs Gonzalez with the lopsided nonsense he was saying, but he is threatening to take action, on behalf of his bosses the PPP, against any opposing views on the stations which he sees as “racial incitement.”
I would also like to remind this so called bishop as well as the broadcasters that the only statutory body with the power to tell a broadcaster anything is the Advisory Committee on Broadcasting until the Broadcast Authority is formed. It is written in stone in our laws!
Finally I want to share with your readers an interpretation of the immunities from prosecution as conferred on our Presidents by our constitution and I have sought competent legal opinion on this matter; this is what I have been told, in the constitution it is stated that the President will be immune from prosecution, but the interpretation of this law, as written in the constitution, was a clause to protect the President from prosecution in case he unknowingly violated the rights of some citizen in the execution of his executive powers.
The constitution expected that this would be a protection against an accidental or oversight breach of the law during the process of making or implementing executive decisions.
This clause in our constitution cannot possibly have intended to mean that the Executive President could use it to deliberately break the law with impunity, as is happening daily in this country now under Mr. Jagdeo i.e. selling state lands to himself at prices less than the real market price, selling house lots which were illegally obtained since government officials were selling lands at prime locations to themselves at prices which were below the market value and reselling it before the expiry of 10 years as required by the law, giving friends massive duty free concessions and privileges not enjoyed by the vast majority of us Guyanese, deliberately breaking tender board/privitisation regulations through NICIL and other organisations including GPC, violating the constitution itself in doing these unlawful acts with impunity and also by not forming the Procurement Commission as required by the constitution.
And there are numerous other misdemeanours in public office recorded since 1999 when Mr. Jagdeo became President.
As far as all of this is concerned, I want to end with this warning, this is an election year and all opposition political parties and their leaders especially those who seem to be comatose on these issues, had better start paying attention and take the necessary action before they have nowhere to take their message to the public before the elections if Edghill forces the channels, which are sympathetic to the opposition, from airing any programming which the ERC can deem to be racial incitement or disruptive to “public order” for fear of losing their licence.
Anthony Vieira

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