State-owned media promotion legal control of NGOS

Jun 10, 2024 Letters

Dear Editor

The State-owned Guyana Chronicle of June 6th carried an article with the heading “This NGO Caricature Must Stop”. It is designed to discredit NGOs and does so by a deliberate distortion of facts. The article is best understood as a contribution to the campaign announced at the ruling PPP’s recent Party Congress to vigorously go after the ‘naysayers’ in civil society. The culmination of this campaign may well be manifest in the – as yet unavailable – draft legislation on NGOs for which the Governance Minister, Gail Teixeira, is responsible.

The State-owned newspaper article floated suggestions on the kind of controls the legislation might contain: “One hopes that in the legislation that numbers, elections and term limits are imposed on the NGOs…. An organisation must have numbers because such numbers reflect national standing. There must be a register of members, with the requirement that each NGO must have a membership of at least 40 persons and an executive of no less than ten members. There must be term limits of two terms only for the chairman, with each term being for two years”… “These NGOs and civil society groups are relentless in their criticism of the government in relation to transparency and accountability. The people who encourage this lopsidedness are the Western embassies through generous donations.”

This authoritarian and sexist approach to NGOs appears to be straight out of the ‘democratic centralism’ playbook, the bit of Marxism-Leninism to which the party renewed its commitment at the recent Congress. Justification for this level of control is reduced in the article to a series of malicious innuendos. The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA), for example, is stated (twice) to have received ‘a generous donation from the British High Commission’, distorts the truth that the BHC offered to mount a workshop to build human rights capacity among non-governmental organizations. The GHRA supplied a list of potential participants who were then invited directly by the BHC. Neither the GHRA or individual members sought or received a cent, the BHC paid all expenses directly – travel and accommodation of the workshop director, venue, refreshments for participants etc.

The Chronicle article was clearly intended as a contribution to discrediting NGOs before launching the proposed NGO legislation by ridiculing them by whatever means possible. Long-standing NGO activists associated with non-partisan organizations are pinpointed by name and ridiculed on the unproven grounds of never having been re-elected.

While the focus of the article is clearly on NGOs, the section from the article quoted above can easily be extended to apply to any civic body – sporting, cultural, humanitarian or religious. To this extent, non-governmental bodies generally rather than adopt a complacent ‘it couldn’t happen to us’ attitude should pay attention. We all have a stake in how our society should be governed. We should not be intimidated into silence.

Sincerely
Executive Committee
GHRA

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