Strides in transparency being reversed under PPP Govt. - TIGI Head

Strides in transparency being reversed under PPP Govt. – TIGI Head

Oct 11, 2022 News

Kaieteur News – While both the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and the People’s National Congress Reform (PNC/R) have been flagged in the past for lack of transparency, over the past two years, strides made to this end have been reversed by the incumbent administration.

This is according to President of the Guyana Institute for Transparency Inc (TIGI), Frederick Collins who while appearing on a Globespan 24×7 discussion noted that citizens are even now afraid to speak out against corruption due to possible consequences. Collins said, “both of them have not been transparent but what we have also said in writing is that over the last two years, we have noticed that whatever freedom we represented, because in our project that we have now, we represented to our founders that things were being freed up – the nation was feeling freer – but since 2020 to now, there has been a closing of the flower. There has been somehow, a perception of consequences if you speak out.”

President of the Guyana Institute for Transparency Inc (TIGI), Frederick Collins

Guyana, during the year 2021, dropped two points on the Transparency International Corruption Index (CPI), meaning that corruption in the country’s public sector climbed, after a full year under the PPP government. When the PPP/C demitted office back in 2015, the country was scoring below 30 points. During the years of the APNU+AFC that score steadily improved reaching 41, however, in the latest ranking by Transparency International, a global coalition against corruption Guyana’s performance dropped from 41 in 2020 to 39 in 2021. The Corruption Perception Index (CPI) is the most widely used corruption ranking in the World, according to the organisation’s website, which also explains that the data recorded in each country measures how corrupt that country’s public sector is perceived to be. A country’s score is measured on a scale of 0-100, where 0 means highly corrupt and 100 means very clean.

For months, transparency watchdogs have been calling on government to release the contracts signed between Guyana and the various mining companies operating in Guyana. In the meantime, this newspaper reported in June last that the country’s third Extractive Industries Transparency (EITI) report made yet another call for the government to release all mining contracts, especially those dealing with large-scale operations.

Since becoming a member of the global body, the report notes that the government agreed to adhere to several requirements. In this case, EITI requirement 2.4 (a) of the 2019 Standard states that Guyana should publicly disclose all mineral agreements entered into force prior to the reporting period, in this case, 2019. Importantly, the report highlights that the country’s Mining Act (1989) does not include any expressed restrictions on the public disclosure of mineral agreements and licenses by the government.
It goes further to state that even the mineral agreement signed on November 18, 2011 for Aurora Gold Mine developed by Guyana Goldfields is silent about restrictions on the public disclosure of the mineral agreement. Be that as it may, that very agreement, along with many others, is not available online for citizens to understand what concessions were granted to these firms versus what the country would get in return. In light of this, Guyana’s third EITI report recommended that a work plan be drafted for the electronic publication of all mineral agreements in the mining sector.

In August of this year, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo was asked for an update on the release of the mining contracts by Kaieteur News Publisher, Mr. Glenn Lall when the VP again promised to make the contracts public. Jagdeo said, “I don’t think these agreements should be secret. Right, because the concessions are standard…many people don’t remember this but the Minister of Finance used to sign every duty free letter that was when I was there and we changed it when I became President and even before that we started moving to change it where all of that, the administering of duty-free concessions would be done by the GRA and not by a political individual and secondly, they would be based on legislation.” He therefore indicated, “I don’t see the reason why many of these are not in the public domain already. I’ll find out about it.”

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