Former speaker of the National Assembly during the PNC administration Sase Narain acknowledges that records were badly kept and that space was a problem during his tenure. He puts part of the blame on then finance minister Carl Greenidge for not making enough resources available for the upkeep of parliamentary documents.
This is in the wake of a series of revelations about what might have happened to the Hansards of 1985 – 1992, a period during which the PNC instituted its Economic Recovery Programme.
Greenidge had recently tabled a motion seeking to have Speaker Raphael Trotman enquire into the missing records and report back to the House. Trotman subsequently reported, almost a month ago, that a leaky roof might have been responsible for the destruction of the records.
“A lot of documents were strewn all over the place. We had to resort to storing them in the attic of the Parliament and then the rain would fall. You see, the responsibility for the maintenance of the Parliament at that time was that of the Ministry of Public Works. They came once or twice and looked at it but that is as far as it got. Whether rain damaged [the transcripts] or they were removed I cannot be sure,” Narain said.
Narain served as Speaker of the National Assembly from January 1971 to December 1992.
Asked how the work of the Parliament would have been affected by the unavailability of documents, Narain said he hardly thought that happened. “The Parliament in those days… was not functioning as a democratic Parliament. Once the government had the majority then they didn’t care. Fortunately we had a very articulate and very vibrant Leader of the Opposition Dr Cheddi Jagan. So you had to be on your toes all the time. He would let nothing slip,” he said.
“Much use wasn’t needed for the Parliamentary debate but it is not only the ERP [that is] missing, also missing was the behaviour of the PPP. I am reliably advised that Mr Trotman should call some of the people who did the Hansard in those days. Some of them may still be alive. I don’t know if he did that. This could be done to compile it.
It may not be very accurate. The newspapers have archives and lots of things would have been reported in the press. It is sad that only that period – the ERP period – and the behaviour of the PPP cannot be found,” he said.
“Trotman was mandated to do the investigation so it is his function to make sure he utilises all available avenues and I would not volunteer because that is not my function. It is his function because the resolution is to the Speaker,” Narain said.
Serious
“I find it very strange that the relevant period where I was the Speaker, I was never requested to say anything. Could you believe that? Doesn’t it sound very strange to you?” he asked.
He called the loss of the documents “serious” and said as a result of this, “it’s my memory against your memory against someone else’s memory. This is not the right thing. You need positive evidence and what we will be giving you is second hand from memory.
“What I recall is that while there were shorthand reporters there were also audio recordings made. Some of those can still be found and historians can put it together,” he said.
He said the compilation of the transcripts was never an easy task. There was a lot of noise in the Parliament and because of this it posed difficulties for the persons who had to be writing what the Member of Parliament was saying. “They had to do the shorthand transcripts and the audio then they would send it to each member who spoke to make corrections and then they would prepare that for compilation into the Hansard,” he said.
Stabroek News asked Narain whether he was aware that these documents could not be found before he left Parliament in 1992 and he responded that he was not. “I mean, nothing like that ever came to my attention. What came to my attention was that space was not available to store documents. The attic where we were using was not a suitable place to store those types of documents,” he said.
Narain said that while he was speaker, he asked for money but it was not forthcoming.
“I believe that in those days Parliament did not have the importance that it should have. It was just like a rubber stamp thing,” he said. “You may search for the documents and not find them but I am informed that there are four or five persons who are still alive who would have worked at that time,” he said. “The Clerk of the National Assembly is responsible for producing Hansards but he could only produce what is made available to him. I don’t think we had a voluminous set of documents,” he said.
He lashed out at the government of the day for expecting more to be done in terms of keeping the Parliament’s records intact in the absence of money. “The companies that used to do some of the printing refused to print because you were not paying them. And Mr Greenidge is responsible to some extent because if he was not giving us the money, [how could we function?],” he asked.
He noted that to this day the Parliament Office is still subjected to the government giving it money.
“Mr Greenidge is entitled to his opinion as I am entitled to mine,” he said, reacting to Greenidge’s concerns about the missing documents and whether more could have been done to ensure that they were preserved. “How could he expect me to keep things in a workable condition if I don’t have the money?” he asked.
“I feel it is not fair to blame Parliament for the loss of those documents. We never had the wherewithal to [preserve them]. You would be ashamed to see what facilities the clerk and I had in Parliament in those days. The speaker’s office wasn’t bigger than this,” he said, pointing out the size of his veranda at his home. “There was a desk and a chair [for the speaker] and two other chairs [for visitors],” he said.
Unpublished
documents
Gordon Forte who was contracted to bind the Hansards in 1992 also gave his account to this newspaper.
“It was a heavy task to organise modern systems for recording, transcribing, editing and publishing the proceedings as nearly real-time as possible. We had to integrate the work of an existing staff of parliamentary reporters, while training new stenographers to an accuracy that warranted the adoption of our product as the official record. We had to introduce to new members the idea of vetting, without substantive modification, the text of their speeches post dicta,” said Forte.
He said Eileen Cox, who was the Hansard editor at the time and the then clerk of the National Assembly Frank Narain asked him to look into the task of editing, printing and binding the existing transcripts of sittings in past years, which had never been rendered into printed Hansard.
“It was agreed that we would together examine the scope of that work, based on the volume of documents the Parliament Office would present, as soon as verbatim transcripts had streamlined the current production process on a sustainable basis. The Parliament Office began, as far as I recollect during the recess of 1993, to collect unpublished documents they could find in their archives,” he said.
He said that early in the second session of that Parliament, the question arose of placing the cost of Hansard formally within the National Budget, “and I was asked to prepare a bid for the services.
“The tender award was delayed beyond the turn of the year, though it came before the budget was passed. We continued after the Christmas recess, and continued on the amicable understanding that arrangements would quite soon be formalised. I will never forget the evident chagrin with which the clerk informed me that the Hansard contract had been awarded to another firm, which had bid a sum which both the clerk and I considered inadequate to maintain standards in the work. But we accepted that the decision was in the executive domain,” he said.
He said that at the time, there was a small backlog of issues still in process from the last of the 1993 sittings, “as well as the few we had recorded of the new year’s sittings.” He said he could not invoice for those issues until they were completed, “some obscure kind of official process had to be arranged for payment for work done in a previous year, and to a contractor not in the budget for the new year.” He said the clerk advised him to suspend printing and binding “until he was sure he could pay me”.
But, “Parliament Office never got approval for that payment, and never asked me for those issues. I handed over on CD word processor files of the unedited transcripts, but I don’t know if they were ever processed further. The matter of the pre-1992 transcripts was never again raised with me. I believe the then clerk, with whom I had achieved the most cordial and mutually respectful business friendship, was too embarrassed to enlarge on the hints Eileen Cox gave about custodial neglect in the archives. In any case, I was too busy rebuilding my commercial business to look back. We are talking of 1994, when I had a heavy personal workload, both paid and unpaid,” he said.
