Muzzling the watchdog

Sep 03, 2011 Editorial

Kaieteur News is once more challenging the award of a contract and once more there is acrimony on the part of the administration. All over the world people challenge governments who respond through their public relations officers in measured tones.
The Guyana Government has a series of public relations officers, all of them working in the various government departments and agencies. The major one is the Government Information Agency (GINA) which the government said would be responsible for access to all Government Ministers and senior Public servants.
Indeed, when the agency first came into being reporters in the private media were told that to access Ministers they needed to access GINA. But more often than not, requests got nowhere. However, the Ministers are people who need all the publicity they could get so it was not long before the reporters made direct approaches to the Ministers.
Similarly, GINA was supposed to be the font of all information pertaining to Government business. This is not really the case, so one must now wonder at the billion-dollar expenditure on GINA each year. There is already a very large expenditure on the Government–owned television station and on the radio station.
Despite this expenditure these state-funded organizations are allowed to enter the small advertising market to compete with the private media houses who depend on advertising for their very survival. However, that is another issue. Suffice it to say that the state-funded media houses in countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia are not allowed to seek advertisements and are free of Government control.
The issue, however, is about the need for information on Government projects.
Kaieteur News recently examined the expenditure on a reconstructed National Insurance Scheme facility. The cost appeared to be astronomical given that there have been similar constructions for much less.
There was no asking the government agency for information. It could be that the public relations personnel there had no interest in garnering information on Government projects. There was an independent approach to the Cabinet Secretary in the wake of the publication of the initial query of the cost of the contract.
There was no acrimony during that initial contact. There was a promise that information would be provided and queries answered. But all that changed when suddenly the Cabinet Secretary suggested that there was mischief afoot. He contended that any challenge of the contract was exaggerated and designed to create distractions.
Then came an unexpected caveat. The Cabinet Secretary contended that the Kaieteur News should also provide a bill of quantities for the constructions that are being held up against the multi-million-dollar NIS construction.
Governments should always be prepared to be examined. The challenge to the construction contract could have been met with a simple release of any information that would have satisfied the challenge. Instead, it becomes a case of the government adopting an attitude that it is under siege and that there are elements out to attack it.
It has been quite some time now that the government has responded in a hostile manner to queries and challenges. When the media raised some queries about the sugar packaging plant, there was a similarly hostile reaction. In anger, the government announced that it was prepared to open its books to a forensic audit.
When the challenge was accepted and the private media moved to undertake the audit suddenly there were other extraneous factors. There was a report that the sugar company could not order an audit. Then there was the contention that special permission was needed FOR ANY AUDIT. It was a case of calling a bluff and when the bluff was accepted, balking at the last minute.
The case of the NIS contract was no different. The promise to release the bill of quantities was suddenly a question of a caveat—that the organization making the challenge produce its own bill of quantities. This is most unusual from any government, but one must assume that Guyana is different, that it is behaving like a private organization which believes that its operations are all private.
Governments are there to be representatives of the people. Media organizations are the watchdogs and to seek to make those watchdogs attack dogs is to seek to divert attention from the questions at hand.

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Muzzling the watchdog

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