Tony Vieira explains why licenses cannot be revoked right now

Mar 23, 2016 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I am a member of the Guyana National Broadcast Authority (GNBA) stand on the matter of the issuance of the 12 radio licenses.  I believe that the recent declarations by Minister Nagamootoo that I am chairing the committee looking into these matters, affords me the opportunity to tell the public what we have been doing.
These Radio licenses issued by Bharat Jagdeo were illegal, on this I have no doubt, and I have written more than once condemning it before I became a member of the Authority. I was at the meeting with Minister Nagamootoo where he expressed the opinion that we must not let our actions to rescind the illegal licenses, stop us from issuing new ones. I don’t remember him saying that we have to disregard the fact that they were illegally issued and must be rescinded.
At no time have I wavered in my total conviction that the 12 radio licenses were issued illegally. 1. There was no Broadcast Authority. 2. There was no Advisory Committee on Broadcasting in place at the time. 3. There were also the agreements of the (a) bi-partisan Board on Broadcasting, (b) the dialogue and (c) the communiqué in place, which in my opinion legally prevented this action by Jagdeo.
I want to say that this is not the reason why we have not issued any new radio license or indeed any new Television Licenses. We did not in effect ever have any broadcast regulations in place. Even after the issuance of the Broadcast Act number 17 of 2011 and illegally activated in 2012, there were no real regulations being enforced, the government of the day, as preoccupied as they were with control of what broadcasters were saying about their corruption and mismanagement, produced and enforced an act which was more intended to curb free speech than to establish any regulations which would inform broadcasting in the public interest, convenience and necessity.
It is that which has occupied us since I became the chairman of the licensing, fees and legal matters committee of the GNBA. The instrument appointing me to this authority is dated 12th October 2015. So the media must understand that prior to that date there was no Broadcast Authority appointed by the APNU/AFC collation government. I believe that the government was waiting for the 3 year contract of the PPP GNBA members, to expire in September 2015 before naming the new authority.
Since November we have established the zones for broadcasting, i.e.  primary, secondary, tertiary and community zones for both radio and Television and we have reduced the rates for TV broadcasting more in keeping with the ability of the broadcasters to pay.
Mr. Editor we need to find out how many radio and TV stations we can legitimately accommodate given the low advertising pie in Guyana. So we would like to commission a survey of the Guyana marketplace especially Georgetown where more than 80% of the TV and Radio stations are concentrated, since the lack of income is contributing to the low level of standards in the industry.
I have always held this view, that saying “we must let the competition establish the amount of stations we can have” is not the right approach. In the final analysis with so many stations vying for such a small advertising pie, there will be poor operational standards. And the public will suffer. At this moment the outstanding broadcast fees owed to the GNBA hovers around 121 million dollars. It is clear that they are having economic difficulties in the broadcast industry; it is this reason why we have not addressed this issue of new licenses especially in Georgetown for either radio or TV as yet, the delay has nothing to do with the 12 Licenses issued through the corrupt actions of Bharat Jagdeo.
And there are other problems for example the PPP has a radio station on the air spewing PPP propaganda all the time. What do we as an authority do when five or six other political parties approach us to request that they also must be given a radio license? We can’t tell them no! To say no would be to violate their constitutional rights to free speech. What do we do when the Americans approach is to put Voice of America on the air here in Guyana. We can’t say no since we have a allowed a foreign channel on the air here in Guyana in contravention of the act. Since our act says that only Guyanese and those CARICOM countries which will allow Guyanese to own TV and Radio licenses in their territory will be allowed to own broadcast stations here.
Also we are introducing a method for stations both radio and television, even those already on the air, to tell us what their programming philosophy will be, so that we do not end up licensing stations which are essentially playing the same thing. i.e. we need our stations to cover all tastes and not all stations trying to be all things to all people there is only confusion there. So not only do we have to level the playing field, we have to establish a proper playing field as well.
I have many friends at the Kaieteur News Including Mr. Glen Lall and I want to assure him that in the end, justice and fair play will prevail in the granting of the radio licenses and that in our mind revocation is our preferred policy we are just looking at the mechanism of action we will use to achieve it.
To this end I and legal members of my committee have already consulted Sir Fenton Ramsahoye to advise us on a way to level the playing field. And we are going to challenge these license issued by Jagdeo but the public must understand,  that we can’t challenge it without asking the judge to declare that Baharat Jagdeo’s actions were illegal and that he committed a malfeasance in office which is a criminal offence. On the other hand, and this is legitimate legal advice we have obtained on the matter, we can also go back to parliament and modify the act to level the playing field, in fact at this time it is very high up on our possible courses of action. We have already met with the TV Broadcasters and we have outlined much of what is contained herein, we will soon meet the radio broadcasters and then the cable operators who also, we believe, have legal issues as to how they have obtained licenses to operate.  So even though we have changed Governments since May 2015 the Current Broadcast Authority has only really been functioning for less than 4 months. And we need a little time to get this right.
Tony Vieira

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