THE WRITING IS ON THE WALL FOR GT&T

Jan 29, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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The Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GT&T) should not be shedding any tears at this time over the plans of the Guyana government to enter into the telecommunication sector. This is not an overnight plan; it was hatched sometime ago and GT&T opted for silence instead of using its financial muscle to prevent what now seems to be unavoidable.
GT&T has recently made the point that government should not be in telecommunication business. It is a point it should have been making a long time ago and therefore it needs to be questioned why the telephone company, given its influence within Guyana, did not confront the government earlier on this question.
GT&T is belated in its criticisms of government involvement in the telecommunication sector. It ought to have known a long time ago that the cable that the government is running from Brazil is not just for the proposed E-governance programme. The excess capacity generated by this cable will be used to serve the business interests of select players who have enjoyed strategic and timely positioning within the local telecommunication sector and who are cronies of the government.
GT&T had to know from its technical people that the E -governance programme did not require it running cable from Brazil. The many branches of government could have been integrated using existing technology and where this was found to be inadequate, existing players in the market such as GT&T could have been invited to make the necessary upgrades to facilitate the automation of government business.
The government was however not interested in asking for such investments from GT&T. Its mission was about allowing its friends and cronies to make money and to pay no mind to fair competition and allowing existing telecommunication firms the right to provide better services.
From day one, the publisher of this newspaper predicted that the cable that is being run from Brazil was to serve the interest of friends of the administration. The E-governance programme will utilise a negligible amount of the total capacity of that cable, the rest of which will have to be put out for commercial tenders. And who are the players best positioned to capitalise? Who have been granted licences that would allow cable, television, radio, telephone and internet services?
Friends of government are the ones best positioned, because while the application for expansion and upgrade by GT&T are yet to be approved. While Digicel is still awaiting liberalisation of the telecommunication sector, the friends of the government are readying themselves to monopolise the spectrum by the advantages that have been handed to them by the government.
It is inconceivable that GT&T did not see this coming. It perhaps did not, like most big companies do, wish to ruffle the feathers of the government, but it had to have been reading what the Kaieteur News had long been saying and therefore it had to have assessed that it would be pushed out of business when the cable becomes fully functional.
GT&T should spare this nation its crocodile tears. It had benefitted under the former regime from monopoly status. Now it is to become the victim of another government. What poetic justice!
The oligarchy has played the usual trick on companies in the telecommunication sector. It set them against each other just as it had set the Kaieteur News against Stabroek News, and just as it had set one local brewery giant against another regional competitor. While ‘Red’ was fighting ‘Blue’, the oligarchy was preparing itself to enter the communication sector by weakening its competition. While the dailies were debating who is entitled to State ads, a new printing press belonging to the oligarchy was being imported. And while one local beer was fighting for market space against a regional competitor, the plans had long been set to have a Trinidadian firm with ties to the oligarchy establish a brewery in Berbice and with a first call on the country’s molasses.
GT&T was silent for too long. It is now reaping the rewards of that silence.
Had it not been for the singular effort of Glenn Lall, the oligarchy would have faced no resistance. One man stood up to the might of the oligarchy and its friends in the government. He faced down their financial pressure as well as the political pressure from a power government. That man was Glenn Lall. He saw it coming all along and he said that the cable would be used to run GT&T and Digicel out of Guyana so that the cronies of the government can take over the telecommunication sector, including telephone, internet, cable, television and radio.
This is the unassailable power that is being placed into the hands of the ruling elite in this country. With it they will conclude the final chapters of the plan to own Guyana and to control everyone within it. The true communist State would have been created on the backs of capitalism.

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