Guyana has not always met its EITI deadlines

Feb 28, 2023 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – Excuses will get us nowhere. And in the ongoing blame-game which is taking place concerning Guyana’s failure to submit, in a timely manner, its 4^th Annual Report, blame and excuses are being applied fast and thick.

One side, the government, appears be laying the blame on two members of the Multi-stakeholder Group (MSG) which oversees the process. Those two members reportedly abstained when it came to voting on the approval of the Terms of Reference (TOR) for the Independent Administrator (IA) that is required to vet specific data relating to the process. In return, the two members are claiming that the process was affected by the ‘disappearance’ of the National Coordinator who was absent for four months.

The two representatives of the civil society component of the MSG are now indicating that draft Terms of Reference (TOR) which was presented for approval was deficient. But why should it have taken so long for this ‘deficient’ TOR to be amended?  It is not as if it is rocket science to prepare a TOR or that this was a completely new exercise. In fact, EITI International provides a draft template for the Terms of Reference for the International Administrator. The template is downloadable and allows for adjustments and changes to be adapt to every country’s situation. So why should the TOR be a problem when the EITI International provides a draft for use by all its member countries?

The TOR process is not new to Guyana. The Third EITl Report for Guyana had already been prepared for the year 2019. It is a public document. The TOR used for the appointment of an Independent Administrator for that Report could have been used as a precedent for amending the draft TOR which had been submitted in respect to the 4^th Report. Blame is now being cast on the National Coordinator. It is said that he was missing for four months from the process. But whether this is so or not should not have delayed, unduly, the process for preparing the TOR for the 2020 report – the Fourth Report. The appointment of the TOR could have been long been expedited.

The ongoing post mortem into this issue therefore should now focus on the following questions. What made the TOR deficient? What would it have taken to have the TOR amended especially considering that a model TOR is available from the EITI International? If the draft TOR submitted by the National Coordinator was deemed deficient, clearly there had to be reasons identified for the deficiencies and clearly therefore those deficiencies could have been and should have been addressed more expeditiously. Why was it necessary to conscript 2 staff into the process? Was it simply to prepare the new TORs? If this is the case then something seriously wrong is taking place within the MSG.  It is hard to imagine what could be so deficient about the TORs that would take four months to fix. There could hardly be the need to reinvent the TORs.

The media has spun this issue as if the PPPC administration has been neglectful in preparing the 4^th Annual Report and that this represents a remission from the standards set by the APNU+AFC administration. This is far from so. The failure to meet the deadline for the submission of the 4^th Annual Report is not the first such occurrence. At the 38^th MSG Meeting held in November 2020, it was reported that the Secretariat would have to write EITI International for an extension for the submission of the 2^nd Report. The extension to be requested was up to February 2021. The same fate greeted the 3^rd Report. At the 45^th MSG Meeting held on 10^th November 2021, a decision was taken to write for EITI International for an extension to submit the said report.

What all of this reveals is that this is not the first time that Guyana has had to ask for an extension of the deadline to submit its reports. And this suggests that there are problems which have to be addressed within the MSG and the local EITI Secretariat. But the problems in not meeting deadlines could well have their origins in the Secretariat’s dependence on external sources for the collection and provision of data. Guyana is not renowned for the timely collection of its data, and the EITI’s Secretariat dependence on external sources for data may well prove to be the fly on its ointment.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• deadlines, e Terms of Reference (TOR), Extractive Industries Transparency (EITI), Guyana, Multi-stakeholder Group (MSG)

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