Civil society forgot about Andrew Bauer. Why?

Feb 03, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – This is Guyana where nothing makes sense and making sense out of people in this land is a scientific impossibility. Let’s start with psychological and sociological reasoning in research.
The researcher tends to put more weight on what an independent mind says. The partisan approach is pregnant with subjective mannerisms. A pro-Trump supporter cannot be relied on to assess the Biden presidency. A fan of Kamala Harris is not going to expatiate on her failures.
In Guyana, a PPP member will guide you through the policy-making decisions of the government with marks of approval for everything the government did. An anti-government voice will see all the policies as having serious defects. The researcher turns to the independent analyst because that is where a more dispassionate assessment will come from.
Mr. Andrew Bauer is a global expert on Sovereign Wealth Funds. Here is what Mr. Bauer pronounced, on the recently passed National Resource Fund Act (NRFA): “A very detailed document and transparent legislation. It’s very detailed and I would say in some ways, it’s even more detailed than the previous bill in terms of, for example, the investment rules, what the fund is allowed to invest in, what it’s not allowed to invest in, what the constraints are around the amount of risk that the asset managers can take; you know these are really great elements of the law. There’s some parts of the law that I’ve never even seen in any law that are so detailed and innovative that I think will really help Guyana, it will help the fund not invest in some of the crazy derivative instruments or art or commodities or whatever that a lot of the funds around the world (fall victim to) and Guyana’s fund will not be allowed to do that…”
On the stroke of midnight, I saw a prominent citizen saying that the NRFA was the last straw and from here on, Guyana’s stability is uncertain. Certain civil society groups have denounced the Act as fundamentally flawed. So where does that leave Bauer? Does Bauer have a political side that is why he gives excellent marks to the Bill? Or is it that we have people in this country masquerading as civil society hiding their Freudian minds?
Let us look at how the researcher should operate. Christopher Ram is an open critic of many aspects of the PPP’s policy output. There is sufficient material from Mr. Ram to describe him as a government critic. Yet Mr. Ram saw nothing sinister with diving Region 4 into four sub-divisions for the purpose of counting the votes which is one of the amendments in the forthcoming changes to the Representation of the People Act.
Attorney Timothy Jonas is the de facto head of the opposition party, ANUG. I haven’t read or seen anything from Mr. Jonas to suggest he is a supporter of the PPP government. Yet Mr. Jonas described the subdivisions as a process of lessening the burden of bureaucracy in the large district of Region 4. Ram and Jonas interpreted the change as an administrative one.
Why should the researcher accept the words of a so-called civil society group formed a year ago named Election Reform Group (ERG)? This entity sees mischief in the amendment to divide Region 4. You read the amendment, and you will be completely baffled to know why counting the votes, in four subdivisions, is a backward step. It is not. It is the political agenda of the ERG that propels it to make such a statement.
The Guyanese economist, Dr. Tarron Khemraj, certainly does not write in support of the Government. Yet he did not describe the NRFA as an unworkable piece of legislation. He went so far as to say, there isn’t much difference between the current Bill and the one that was passed in 2019 by the APNU+AFC government. Yet when that Act was passed, there was no outpouring of gloom and doom. This is the kind of pathological hypocrisy that is tearing away the fabric of this society and one is at a loss to find out how the government is going to cope with this relentless outbreak of poisonous lava?
Finally, one more episode of what the government has to deal with. In five editorials, the Stabroek News lamented the removal of Dr. Vincent Adams as head of the EPA. Dr. Adams sits as one of six leaders on the apex of the opposition parliamentary party, AFC. Yet this very newspaper in a recent editorial rejected the government nominating anyone from the Private Sector Commission (PSC) to be on the board to administer the sovereign wealth fund because PSC is too close to the government. What a mess Guyana is in.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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