Democracy or dictatorship?

May 13, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Guyana’s leading citizen, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo is in agony. He suffers from a piercing gripe in the gut that just could not let him rest, twists him into knots. His face is grim, conveys his pain, and what gushes out his mouth are the acids and poisons that consume him. Jagdeo says that he is about democracy, that Guyana is a strong and still growing democracy.

But even a cursory study of this national leader’s behaviour immediately reveals how much he is a contradiction of the democracy that he and the PPP love to chant at every opportunity. His relationship, his exchanges, and his overall attitude with the independent media in Guyana speak for themselves about the undemocratic ways that have become among his worst features.

A genuine democracy can rightly boast about a free media. One that is free to ask any question on the heavy, disputed issues of the day, one that should expect clear and complete answers. Neither of this has happened in Guyana, with Jagdeo standing out in his repugnant practices that make him into what he should not be. It is unfortunate that a former head of state, a man who once and still rubs shoulders with regional and world leaders, has reduced himself to a figure of rowdiness and ridicule in his dealings with Guyana’s independent media. The role of the media is a pivotal one, a check on what is happening, and whether such matches with what the government and its spokespeople, leaders and ministers, are saying. In normal circumstances, senior public servants and public works project heads should number among those cleared to speak about the developments in the projects that are under their control. In Guyana’s style of governance and democracy, however, all that was normal has been banished.

Politicians and ministers are the ones mostly authorised to speak and, in many instances, even the ministers are either overshadowed by Jagdeo or silenced by him. He is the one doing most of the talking and sharing where projects and other national issues stand. He pushes the independent media to imitate the impotent State and friendly media. He shouldn’t expect that from this publication.

The result is that when the media should be treated with courtesy and respect, its professionals are held to one harangue after another by Jagdeo. His language is intemperate, his bearing is of a man that is angry and volatile, someone ready to erupt, so sensitive he has become. He is most sensitive about his management of the nation’s oil patrimony; more accurately, his mismanagement of a potential US trillion-dollar sector. Jagdeo is asked a polite question about ExxonMobil’s offshore oil operations, and he flies off the handle. Is this democracy in action, or a wild-eyed dictator, on the rampage? He shuffles around vital questions about the new amounts of oil found in the last eight discoveries announced by ExxonMobil. He comes up with all kinds of hollow and unconvincing responses to questions pertaining to an unlimited parent company guarantee from ExxonMobil for Guyana if an oil leak or, worse, a scary oil spill occurs at one of the company’s offshore production sites.

The Wales gas-to-energy (GTE) project is on track to be the most expensive project in the history of Guyana to date, and Jagdeo plays hide and seek with clear answers about the viability of the massive three-phase GTE project. It is Jagdeo’s US$2B baby, one that stirs the anticipation of energy-starved Guyanese, but the leader that is touting and pushing the project wants the independent media, and by extension Guyanese, to blindly accept whatever he says and nothing else. No clear and published feasibility study, or nothing related to the financial components underlying the project and justifying it, and Jagdeo stuffs this down the throats of Guyanese and tells them to swallow hard. Is this a democracy that is growing, or a dictatorship in the making, a one-man reign, one that has appointed himself king and deity?

Whatever he is, we insist that Jagdeo has no clothes to conceal his weaknesses. When he settles for blustering his way out of tight media corners, all he succeeds in doing is making himself look more dictatorial.

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