Saying that he understands that “mistakes can be made”, Opposition Leader David Granger yesterday said that there is need for duplicates to be made of parliamentary records and stored at different locations.
Had this been done it would have prevented the total destruction of the Hansards between the years 1985 and 1992, he said.
Granger -who is also the leader of the PNCR whose parliamentary record of governance in its latter years in office has been totally destroyed-commented on the issue yesterday when contacted by Stabroek News.
“They [the Hansards] are precious documents and duplicates should be provided and these should be stored at the National Library, National Archive, University of Guyana library…” Granger told this newspaper.
Adding that the records are an “important part of the memory of the nation” the Opposition Leader said that “more care should be taken of them” and that they should be “given better protection.” He pointed out that ten years of records have been destroyed.
He noted that even copies of newspapers are kept at various locations as is provided for under the newspaper act and stressed that this should be done with the Hansards.
“I don’t see why the same cannot be done for the Hansards”, Granger said noting that while it is understandable that mistakes can occur it is difficult to understand that the records are only kept at one location.
Recently in the National Assembly it was learnt that Hansards for 1985 – 1992, a period during which the PNC instituted its Economic Recovery Programme are no more.
The information came to light after former finance minister and now APNU parliamentarian Carl Greenidge 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.
Greenidge in a letter in this newspaper yesterday in response to former speaker Sase Narain, who last week said that the records were badly kept during his tenure and that part of it was Greenidge’s fault for not making enough resources available, said that the “battle will be re-engaged when the House comes out of recess in October.”
“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 in an interview with this newspaper last week.
Narain served as Speaker of the National Assembly from January 1971 to December 1992.
However, Greenidge in his letter yesterday said that the inference from Narain’s comments was that he did not complain about the destruction of the copies of Hansard because the basis for their loss was somehow laid during his tenure.
“This is an unfortunate and unhelpful line. I have obligations as a parliamentarian and citizen. Whatever I may have done about allocations in the past cannot justify the deliberate destruction of national records,” the parliamentarian said in his letter.
He pointed out that however poor a state the records were in by 1992, they were handed over by the PNC to the administration in Parliament under the PPP/C. He said that the Speaker has now submitted a report to the effect that they were soaked in 2002 or 2003 and presumably thrown away.
“Which part of that contradictory explanation points to action by Greenidge and the Ministry of Finance prior to 1992?” he questioned
“In 28 years the PNC kept parliamentary documents, including those of the 1st PPP Government of 1953, of the Interim Administration of 1957, of the 1961 PPP Government and of the Burnham and Hoyte years even in the face of severe financial and fiscal crises. The report confirmed that the documents were handed over to the incoming PPP regime which then at the initiative of Frank Narain, the Clerk, received Dr Jagan’s approval for funds for a library and subsequently, external including technical assistance in 2000 for the purpose of properly storing and retrieving these documents belonging to the nation,” Greenidge said.
