Dear Editors,
I would like to thank our former President and current Vice President for sharing data and information that exposed the financial affairs of the International Decade for People of African Descent Assembly- Guyana (IDPADA-G) to public scrutiny. It really was an excellent demonstration of the power of information, and the importance of transparency and accountability in Government affairs. Providing more access to government data has the potential to help the people of Guyana out of the core dilemma that we face as a people – we need a way out of the politics of racial division, a relic of a cold war past, and a path to trust and reconciliation.
The politics of today is inconsistent with the group dynamics of forming, storming, and norming and performing. The simple fact is that Guyanese like each other. We value our diversity in its myriad forms, and we love and help our friends and family from all different religious groups, racial groups and even different nationalities – and I challenge anyone to prove otherwise. The problem that ordinary Guyanese face is that our politics is not in alignment with our way of life, and it is strangling our advancement as a nation. We need enlightened political leadership to help us realise our Guyanese dream. Even though this is our citizens’ utmost desire – only one political party, the PPP/C, is showing any awareness of it. The major opposition continues to fashion itself to represent only Afro-Guyanese, an unrealistic political agenda for a diverse nation like Guyana, and their utterances and pursuits reveal their incapacity or perhaps their lack of desire to find a path to unity and trust.
Even the newest members of the Opposition, people like Amanza Walton-Desir, fail to even attempt to try to inspire the nation. In Guyana, politics is a power grab that is centered on controlling the nation’s resources and it manifests locally around the issuing of contracts and recipients of benefits. There is a public perception around the flip flop that takes place when the ruling party changes.
It is said that with any change in political administration, there is a corresponding rise in new business registrations – implying that contracts are taken away from some and awarded to others without any form of public scrutiny. Whether this is indeed a trend can be ascertained with the provision of data from the relevant registries to the general public. There is also a blackout of easily understood information about decision making in agencies like the GYBT. We need access to data from many government organizations to do analysis by gender, ethnicity and region not only to expose corruption but to identify policy gaps and to engage citizens in co-creation.
We are living in the age of Big Data, Data Science, and Digital Era Government. Data Democratization is the process of liberating data from traditional silos within organisations and making it more available, with due consideration for accuracy, privacy and security, to more participants to yield more value from information. The internet era and its aligned technologies provide tools and Agile Methodologies to support rapid development of data visualization dashboards. Democratization of government databases will open up government policies to more scrutiny, it will empower us to build on information that we have to serve under-represented groups and provide some institutional scaffolding towards the Guyanese political dream. Most importantly of all – it will serve to expose corruption and support the building of that all-important quality without which we cannot advance economically, politically or socially – trust.
Governments may try to ignore or delay digital transformation, but it is not a wise course of action because information technology is so ubiquitous and disruptive that digital transformation of government is inevitable. Harvard KSG’s Professor David Eaves expressed it this way ‘I do not worry about governments failing to adapt to the digital age — they will eventually do that. I fear how governments will adapt. Will a world of agile, learning government’s power democratic rights that enable us to create better societies? Or will they surveil us and eliminate dissent to create societies that serve their interest?” All the questions that the Vice President asked of IDPADA-G can also be asked back to him and to the President about many initiatives that they undertake – including criteria for grants awarded to various groups.
Let us make these and similar questions a baseline henceforth about all initiatives that are using taxpayer’s monies – ‘“How much of the $100M allocated annually since 2019 and $68M in 2018 was spent on paying salaries, who are individuals that were paid, what amounts were they being paid and how were they selected? How much of that sum was spent on rental, who owns the buildings rented, and what process was used for the selection of the buildings?” In order to support a One Guyana agenda, with its implications of fairness, equality and justice, it is important that we establish a culture a transparency and accountability. There are calls for more Government data and information from many different interest groups in Guyana and the diaspora. Politics in Guyana needs to evolve beyond the greed and the war for the nation’s resources camouflaged as an ethnic security dilemma to a higher agenda of service to the nation’s people.
As a citizen of this country, I can never recognize myself and my fellow citizens from the descriptions of the ‘political analysts’ and statisticians and from all the blatant lies and untruths and contortions of reality. From where will enlightened leadership arise? It is my hope that this controversy can help us all to realise the value of information and the potential of information technology and the digital era technologies to help us to build trust and advance as a nation. The Guyana Chronicle is reporting that Mr. Vincent Alexander said that ‘persons can go to the organization and request a copy of the statement to read.’ This way of operating is now being termed ‘traditional.’ We need to bring our leaders, not only into the age of digital transformation, but into a new culture of accountability and transparency.
We are living in the age of the internet which not only facilitates rapid spread and access to information but supports innovation and digital disruption – news ways of problem solving – and all our leaders need to be cognizant that we can make use of the technologies to democratize the data in the service of greater transparency, accountability and national unity. I look forward to our President and Vice-President taking action towards greater transparency and accountability in all government affairs.
Sincerely,
Sandra Khan
