While the duplicity of the Minister of Natural Resources, Mr Robert Persaud has been starkly exposed in two separate meetings he held on mining with no less than a standing committee of Parliament and the Guyana Human Rights Association, his woes are symptomatic of deeper problems in this 21-year-old reign by the PPP/C.
The first is that ministers and leading officials have been given to think that they can mislead, dissemble and toy with the public without consequence. They feel that they are above the law and beyond the reach of institutional checks and secondly that their current President, immediate past President and party will forever protect them. There have been other cases where this minister’s words and actions have been called into question without official censure. When illegal miners were snared at Marudi in May of this very year, instead of being immediately prosecuted, they were allowed to be considered for a lottery of mining plots. Not surprisingly, some of these miners were known to have close ties with the ruling party. The outcry that followed prevented these plans from fructifying. In his previous portfolio, when it was clear that sugar was in a disastrous state, Minister Persaud had the audacity to state that local managers were incapable of running the Skeldon factory and that its management should be outsourced to a Chinese or Indian company. Of course, there had been no official discussion of this parachuted proposal and it rested there except that a manager from Tate and Lyle was later seconded to Skeldon this year without a word to the public. The minister must be aware from his scrutiny of democratic legislatures elsewhere that there are serious consequences for misleading MPs and it is now left to be seen what the Natural Resources Committee of Parliament will do.
The truth is that a series of PPP ministers have been able to escape unsanctioned with the most atrocious behaviour over the last 21 years which in other places would have warranted resignations, dismissals, prosecution etc. The executive here has neither practised nor invited accountability from its senior officials and this in part explains Minister Persaud’s present problems.
The second issue is the overwhelming lack of transparency in government business. On top of the PPP’s historic marxist predilection to secrecy and control of information, the Jagdeo administration added a new and more deeply troubling dimension. Secret deals particularly in the last years and months of his administration were being struck with all and sundry and cloaked under an information blackout. This was enabled by a complete unwillingness to implement legislative and other measures which would place all government business in the open and eliminate any room for hidden deals and attendant shenanigans.
As a result, the Jagdeo administration stonewalled on access to information legislation and when the embarrassment became too great it finally acquiesced and the coup de grâce has been the appointment of a former Attorney General as the Commissioner of Information, an act that will not inspire confidence in anyone seeking the most straightforward information.
So, in this milieu of pervasive unwillingness to be open and transparent, the executive and its ministers have marched on with a series of deals with have not benefited from the antiseptic qualities of bright sunshine. It is the same folly that embarrassed the Ministry of Local Government in relation to the proposal for a waste recycling project which had to be withdrawn and re-advertised after its original preferred choice was unable to satisfactorily answer media queries. It is the same type of arrangement that has been struck with the DY Patil group of India for agriculture/biofuel to the complete ignorance of the public. It is particularly disconcerting because of the group’s cosy connections with former President Jagdeo. It is same quality of understanding that has been struck with China-owned China Paper which has advertised for environmental services even though the public is completely at sea as to what it is doing in this country and where. It is the exact flawed dealing that has seen Chinese company Bai Shan Lin creating a parking lot supposedly for the GRA when it should really be creating hundreds of value-added jobs in the timber industry. It is the same type of artifice that has allowed a primarily tea company from India to begin exporting a large amount of logs from Guyana without advising the public of its commitment to operate wood processing facilities here. It is the same state of affairs that has kept the identity of the putative Marriott Hotel investor a secret all these months. It is into this mould that Minister Persaud’s arrangement with Muri Brasil Ventures and others fall into. Transparency should be the watchword and it is not. It is undoubtedly one of the key factors in the perennially poor rating that has been accorded to Guyana by Transparency International. In Minister Persaud’s case, his exposure is even more damning as his ministry has committed to operating under the forest protection agreement with Norway in the most transparent manner possible. Yet, a survey permission with a promise for prospecting was signed by him, never publicized and when the concerned stakeholders sought information they were misled.
This will not sit well with the government’s commitment under the Norway forest deal for a formal relationship with the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). It was only in September this year that Minister Persaud spoke glowingly about what the government was going to do to subscribe to EITI’s purpose of ensuring higher levels of transparency in how countries’ natural resources are governed and which commits countries to full disclosure of state revenues from the extractive sectors.
What President Ramotar and his government need to absorb from this fiasco is that it is unacceptable, improper and insulting to the people of this country for memoranda of understanding and actual deals, committing the people’s resources, to be struck without their knowledge or to the complete incognizance of watchdogs and the institutions which have responsibility in this matter. Undoubtedly some MoU’s and deals will contain information that cannot be released because of its proprietary nature. These portions can be redacted and the remainder made available to those who should have it.
If the government had an operational information policy or was able to rise to the occasion after 21 years in office it would have already worked out an arrangement where all MoU’s and contracts signed by the state would be formally lodged with parliament and made available at the respective ministries and online. There is no such policy only haphazardness. So the MoU with the Trinidad government for farming is available but those for Muri Brasil Ventures and DY Patil are completely inaccessible and the public is being spoon fed by the government with information it can hardly trust. As of now the secrecy surrounding these deals raises serious questions about whether the government is committed to ensuring transparency and rectitude. It can ill afford this as further damage will be done to the country’s image and serious investors are likely to be deterred.
