In a letter to this newspaper on February 1, Mr Enrico Woolford of EMW Communications/Capitol News criticized the National Frequency Management Unit (NFMU) for failing to divulge who is operating on which frequency in Guyana. This is in a context – as he reminded the public in a second letter to Stabroek News published on February 4 – where Chinese State TV has been granted a 24-hour channel (Channel 27/Cable 78) by the Government of Guyana to broadcast its English language programming.
When the agreement with the Chinese was apparently signed at the end of 2011, everyone was too absorbed by election-related issues to give the matter the attention it deserved, and now it seems that the implementation of the agreement has sneaked up on us almost unawares. As we reported yesterday, China Central TV (CCTV) was commissioned on Friday, with China’s Ambassador to this country, Mr Zhang Limin being reported as saying that it offered Guyanese the opportunity to learn about the culture, history and current issues of the Chinese people. No doubt it does, but there are surely less problematic ways of achieving the same end.
There has not been a great deal of public reaction to Mr Woolford’s two letters, although there should have been. How on earth, the bewildered citizen should be demanding, can the government make an allocation on what the administration itself routinely describes as a scarce national resource (the electromagnetic radio spectrum) to a foreign government to broadcast to this country on a 24-hour basis?
China, it must be remembered, does not have free media. On the contrary, censorship is the norm and for good measure it has controls on the internet as well. It is not a democracy. Its government eschews Western liberal values, and the rule of law is not the concept that comes unhesitatingly to mind when contemplating Beijing. And yet this is the foreign government which has now been granted the freedom in this country to bombard the population directly or indirectly with its world view or whatever propaganda it sees fit.
Segments of that population, it must be remembered, have been denied access to local private TV channels for years, while everyone within the boundaries of the 83,000 square miles has been forced to endure a state radio monopoly for decades. So once again, will the Government of Guyana kindly explain to us why, in contravention of the norms for any democracy, it has turned over a channel to the control of not just a foreign nation, but an undemocratic foreign nation? Just what was its rationale?
This is not to say that China does not have worthwhile programmes which we would want to air here, let alone that all of them will constitute propaganda; but there is a distinction between screening individual programmes, and giving a foreign state access to the airwaves to broadcast whatever it sees fit on a 24-hour basis, to the exclusion of local broadcasters who have waited for years for a licence to extend their signals. It might be a different matter if the spectrum was not so limited, and foreign broadcasters with a contrary perspective could be accommodated too – such as the BBC or CNN or some Caricom broadcaster, to give three random examples – in order to introduce a certain balance. But the electromagnetic spectrum is finite, and ‘balance’ is the very last thing the government is interested in.
To date the government’s defence of this extraordinary move has been a good deal less than compelling. According to a Gina press release, Dr Luncheon on Thursday claimed that the arrangement pre-dated the embargo on new licences, and that the channel for the Chinese had been identified during Mr Bharrat Jagdeo’s term of office from 2001 to 2006. He was reported as going on to say that he was yet to be briefed on the reason for the ten-year delay in the conclusion of the agreement, but the government was nevertheless pleased that it had been implemented.
However, the reason for the delay is neither here nor there; the fact is that the pact was announced not in 2001, but at the end of December 2011, exactly when no deals of that kind should have been taking place. There was in any case, a new government and parliament at that point, and the expectation was that the long awaited Broadcasting Authority would be appointed, the same authority which grants licences for TV and radio broadcasters. It would appear, therefore, that the government tried to rush through the agreement at a time, as said above, when the public’s attention was distracted, because it knew it was in breach of its own agreement with the main opposition that no new licences would be granted in the interim.
It had, of course, earlier already licensed the Education Channel, an act of bad faith which elicited only a muted response, partly because no one wanted to object to anything ‘educational.’ Before he left office, however, President Jagdeo in another act of bad faith also licensed 11 radio stations, all of which were perceived to be aligned to government. But there are no contrary voices on the radio which would contribute to a national debate. As events in relation to the Linden accord have demonstrated, government still seems determined to keep a stranglehold on the ‘airwaves sector,’ as if the promulgation of a single viewpoint would help persuade the Guyanese populus to see the world as the PPP/C sees it.
The real problem for the governing party is that they are several decades behind the times; the internet has overtaken everything, and is completely outside their control. Nowadays, there are multiple sources of information available to the public, none of which can be shut down or effectively censored by those who rule over us. Dominating the spectrum, therefore, and excluding unwanted voices from the airwaves is simply counter-productive for the government. All it will succeed in doing is opening itself to justifiable accusations that it suffers from an authoritarian mindset, an impression which has now been reinforced with the China TV arrangements.
Which brings us back to Mr Woolford’s first letter. He asks in so many words: exactly what is available in the ‘airwaves sector’ and precisely what has been allocated by the National Frequency Management Unit and to whom?
If the NFMU can be so generous as to allot a channel to the Chinese, then are we to assume the electromagnetic radio spectrum is not as limited as we have been told? The public would like to know the answers to the questions above so a little light can be cast on a murky issue. Broadcasting by its very nature is public, so it almost comes close to being a contradiction in terms to have such secrecy over frequency availability and allocations. As Mr Woolford says, we need transparency and fairness in this area.
