Dear Editor,
There are a lot of people in this country parading as experts in numerous areas, when in fact it is clear that they are not.
That the NFMU violated numerous aspects of our financial laws is now very clear and the necessary people must be removed from office and charged where they have committed an offence. The public is demanding it, and I support that call. I have no question that we have been dealing very cavalierly with our limited national resource of frequency allocations and have been giving it away when other countries are treating it with the respect it deserves, and are demanding large fees for its use.
I have myself been far from satisfied as to how the TV broadcast frequencies have been allocated to other entities, who are not broadcasters, and the same illegal practices which apparently ruled the operation of the NFMU’s accounting and financial systems, are also very evident in the allocations and giving away of broadcasting frequencies for purposes other than broadcasting.
In other words, Editor, I am suggesting a frequency audit as to exactly how certain people got the band of frequencies which they are now using, and how such frequency allocations agree with our submissions to the International Telecommuni-cations Union in Geneva. I think that the necessary paperwork must be available to substantiate what was done, and by whose authority it was done. And I am talking about the entire spectrum from 9 kHz to the 400 GHz.
The UHF TV band channels 51 to 83, ATSC 692.81 MHz to 884 MHz ATSC pilot, is not available to the Broadcast Authority to allow the licensing of UHF broadcasting. I do firmly believe that we have too many commercial stations on the air in Georgetown and environs now, and further competition may drop standards even further and not serve the public interest. However, there are applications which we have to address, such as non-commercial TV broadcasts and community TV broadcasting which will require spectrum which we do not have. There is no shortage of frequencies in the rural areas.
The NFMU has been less than forthcoming to the Broadcast Authority as to who and how these UHF frequencies were authorized to be issued to non-broadcasters such as cable systems and telephone cell services, and frankly even if we did allow non broadcasters to use these frequencies between 500 and 890 MHz, we as a nation ought to be told why this limited national resource was given away in Guyana, when everywhere else it is being sold for enormous amounts of money.
The NFMU would not, as the editorial of the Stabroek News (May 23) suggests, receive a lot of money from radio, TV broadcasters and cable operators; it is really a very minute amount of the money when compared to the billions which is collected from telephone links, and especially cellular and other such services annually.
When the PPP government began to govern this country in 1992, it was indeed collecting a very small amount in revenue from the NFMU, but this ballooned exponentially upward with the coming of the frequencies which support cellular phone services, so why was the structure of the NFMU not modified to cope with this huge amount of income? How is it possible that they left in place a small management structure headed by one man, instead of being overseen by a board of some sort?
All of this has happened because of certain flaws in our laws which were probably deliberately left that way to allow the irregularities we see being disclosed before us daily. Sure, the President has too many powers, but in writing new laws and not rewriting others to involve parliament more in the decision-making process and diminish the powers of ministers, we are continuing to spread the corruption virus throughout our entire system of governance. To have our time in power and leave the same ‘opposition has no power principle’ on which we operate in this country untouched, is not acceptable. Making sure that our supporters have representation when we are in opposition is not only good for democracy, but for ensuring that the winner does not indeed take all, and that when we are in opposition at any time in the future, we will still have a say in what goes on and still be able to demand it for our supporters. True shared governance is not taking a few PPP men and making them ministers in our government; true shared governance is making sure that we empower the opposition to function effectively on behalf of their supporters when in opposition.
Also I am firmly of the belief that before the new Telecommunications Bill is passed into law someone competent must look at it to make sure that all of the pitfalls contained in it are removed. I especially would like the powers of the minister to be less prominent, and the parliament more so.
In addition I am firmly of the view that, since we have a Broadcast Authority now, and since the Telecommunications Bill does not seek to replace it, the Broadcast Authority must be given the right to issue frequencies in the broadcast spectrum, when it decides to issue a licence.
In the present system if the Broadcast Authority decides to issue a licence to some entity to broadcast, that entity still has to wait for the NFMU to decide if there is a frequency available. If the NFMU decides to give the entity a hard time, it can in effect not issue the frequency and frustrate the Broadcast Authority to license anyone. We have seen it before and we can see it again.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira