Liberalizing radio or limiting freedom of expression?

Mar 19, 2013 Editorial

Last week we had cause to be critical of the issue of radio licences by President Bharrat Jagdeo as part of his promise to liberalise radio in Guyana. For nearly five decades there has been a solitary radio station, ever since the government acquired the then privately owned radio station that people had come to know as Radio Demerara.
That radio was spawned by the Rediffusion group that had radio stations in just about every English-speaking Caribbean country. As some businesses go, the time came when the Rediffusion group opted to sell its shares in the radio station. The Guyana Government bought it.
But by then the government had set up its own radio station, British Guiana Broadcasting Service (BGBS).This was later to become Guyana Broadcasting Service. When the government bought Radio Demerara it was not long before it merged the new acquisition with the government-owned radio. From that time the government enjoyed a monopoly on radio.
By the mid-1990s there were calls for radio to be liberalized and many private people applied to Government for a spot on the spectrum for independent radios. Trinidad had already recognized that a radio monopoly was unconstitutional. The result was that radios began to proliferate in the country. There were religious stations, pop stations, and stations for every aspect of the culture.
In Guyana there continued to be the solitary radio station despite the best efforts of those who needed to make their broadcasts. People began to operate pirate radio stations and the government moved with alacrity to seize the transmitters.
One of them went to court—Anthony Vieira through his company, Vieira Communications Limited. Justice Jainarayan Singh ruled that Vieira had a right to broadcast. The government appealed but the matter remained in abeyance until Vieira sold his rights to Queens Atlantic Investments Inc.
Indeed President Jagdeo had agreed that radio would be liberalized but that he did not want the same situation that prevailed before the attempts to curb television. But of interest is the manner in which radio has been liberalized.
We are not clear whether those granted licences were allocated a frequency before the licence. If they were granted the licence before the frequency then there was a high degree of irregularity. They had to know what equipment they would have needed hence the need for the frequency allocation to precede the licence.
We note that one of the recipients has voiced strenuous objections to being accused of enjoying Jagdeo’s largesse. But in so doing he has lied most profusely. The argument that the radio channels (plural) resulted from his purchase of the assets of Vieira Communications Limited cannot hold water.
Vieira, when he decided to buck the system, started to broadcast on 100.1 FM, a frequency later to be used by the government.
The other point of note is that since Vieira was squatting illegally he did not have a frequency. The courts ruled that he was entitled to a frequency so by extension, Queens Atlantic Investments Inc. would have bought the rights to one radio frequency to be allocated by the government. That company got five. The lie is that the five accrued from the purchase of VCT assets.
Queens Atlantic Investments apart, the private media owners say that they have been slighted. Jagdeo made radio frequencies to his political party. This is discriminatory since no other political party was afforded a radio.
He then proceeded to allocate a cluster of radio frequencies to people close to him, close enough to be considered members of his household. Surely, there was a bias in the allocation and a certain level of dishonesty when Jagdeo said that he was liberalizing radio in Guyana.
At best, if the spectrum is not as infinite as they say Jagdeo could have organized a lottery with the applicants instead of handpicking those to whom he wished to give a licence. This being the case, the people who were denied without reason have every right to challenge this new dispensation and we believe that they would.

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