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The truth is Guyana is democratic, free

Mar 02, 2011 Letters

Dear Editor:
Guyana is free. The international-based Freedom House declared Guyana to be free since 1993. Hamilton Green’s letter in the Kaieteur News of February 28, 2011, captioned, “Prem Misir must deal only with the truth” contends that Guyana is not free.
This fellow must realize that Guyana’s democracy is not evolving to meet his every whim and fancy, but growing in relation to the national aspirations of the Guyanese people. Nonetheless, it is still a democracy, and a good one at that, given that at the barest minimum, this fellow has the opportunity to disseminate his views in the mass media.
The Democracy Index of the Economist 2010 ranks Guyana’s democracy in the same category as Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Greece, Italy, France, Israel, Slovakia, Brazil, Hungary, Panama, Mexico, Argentina, Suriname, Indonesia, El Salvador, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, Ukraine, Malaysia, Dominican Republic, Philippines, among others.
The Index determines Guyana as having an adequate electoral process, civil liberties, and pluralism.
I mentioned the PNC’s callous legacy to underline its relationship to financial viability problems that Guyana experienced for 10 years from 1992. In 1992, the PNC’s legacy of US$2.1 billion debt, inter alia, brought home the consequences of the PPP/C government’s financial inability to provide much needed social services in the early 1990s.
At that time, debt payments in Guyana were about 105 per cent of government’s revenue, 50 per cent of exports, and the PPP/C Administration interfaced and struggled with some burdensome implications of
the invasive financial viability problems between 1992 and 2000.
It is plain inappropriate for Green to not factor in ‘financial viability problems’ as a variable in the equation to disseminate half-truths about whether Guyana is free; since financial viability problems inhibited the free growth of democracy.
Easing the colossal debt burden from 1992 was one of the most significant ameliorating factors to addressing the issue of financial viability; The HIPC initiative was an important variable in the process of minimizing the impact of the financial viability problems.
From all indications, the Guyana Government expresses commitment to a Freedom of Information Law, and apparently, the Freedom of Information Bill may soon see the corridors of Parliament.
Nonetheless, legislation is not a panacea for resolving problems. For instance, look at the U.S. race relations laws. The U.S. has the world’s preeminent race relations laws, but non-enforcement of some enables racial discrimination to persist.
To all intents and purposes in the U.S., there is de facto discrimination, not de jure discrimination, as laws are available, in theory, to address racism.
What we do not want in Guyana is a similar situation, where there is a Freedom of
Information Law, with no ‘teeth’. In a situation, where we have a Freedom of Information Law, in theory, we would have de jure access to information; nonetheless, we may still not have, in practice, genuine access to information, even though we have a Freedom of Information Law.
Under these circumstances, there would be de facto non-access to information.  Pragmatically, we should have both de jure and de facto access to information.
Therefore, it is important that the Guyana Government crafts a superlative Freedom of Information Bill, rather than present a half-baked bill merely to be ‘hip’ for decorative legislative purposes. And just that we should know, some countries with a Freedom of Information Law, conceivably, have intermittent problems of enforcement. And clearly in these cases, cumbersome clauses diminish enforcement.
Prem Misir

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