Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo’s recent acerbic response to the country’s sharp dip in its Global Press Freedom rating by the media watchdog, Reporters Without Borders (RWB) is not in the least bit surprising. The degraded rating comes at a time when both VP Jagdeo and the PPP/C administration, as a whole, might have been hoping that the recently enhanced global attention which the country has attracted on account of its ‘oil fortunes’ would not have been ‘spoilt’ by an unflattering pronouncement about an important aspect of its image from a credible international media ‘watchdog.’ Perhaps more to the point – and since he is the country’s ‘point man’ on the oil and gas sector – Mr. Jagdeo would have seen the RWB’s recent assessment of the state of media freedom in Guyana as, perhaps, a downpour on his own oil and gas ‘parade.’ Put differently, the former two-term President of the Republic understands only too well that while, in previous years, it would have been expected that Guyana’s Global Press Freedom Index rating was likely to be consistent with perceptions of the country as a developing democracy its present oil bonanza and its attendant opening to a generous measure of positive global attention, would have had the effect of correspondingly altering the country’s longstanding global media freedom ratings. If that is indeed what the former President thought, it very much appears that he got it all wrong.
If Mr. Jagdeo has been reading the tea leaves sufficiently studiously he would have found out that quite a few countries with much more natural resources (and attendant prosperity) than our own, continue to experience considerably less than flattering international media freedom ratings on account of their shabby disregard for the freedom of journalists to do their jobs without political interference.
What is decidedly mind-boggling is what appears to be Mr. Jagdeo’s seeming belief that, taken alone, whatever the Guyana Press Association says or does can cause the RWB to tear down the country’s media freedom ratings.
Of particular significance is the fact that the official rant on the RWB’s considerable downgrading of Guyana press freedom rating came from the VP rather than from the Minister with responsibility for media matters, or, perhaps, even from the President himself, in one of his various public pronouncements. Herein lies an unmistakable sign on just where Mr. Jagdeo is positioned on the administration’s authority ‘totem pole.’
In the matter of Guyana’s position in the media pecking order the Vice President may well have been more than a little miffed by the RWB’s unstated but, nonetheless, unmistakable assertion that there is no correlation between Guyana seemingly ‘going places’ (on account of its oil bonanza) and the country’s slippage insofar as media freedom is concerned. The simple fact is that while the country’s oil bonanza is a matter of happenstance, its media freedom credentials are not. It is a consequence of the manner in which the country is governed.
All that said, it was altogether disingenuous of the Vice President to hang the cause of the RWB’s downward rating of the country’s media freedom position around the neck of the Guyana Press Association (GPA). Indeed, it can hardly be denied that in recent years the leadership of the GPA has been seen to be doing much to ‘hold’ the media freedom ‘fort’ that is, not infrequently, under siege.
In jumping in to take a tilt at what the RWB had to say about the country’s media freedom credentials, Mr. Jagdeo also appeared to be sending a less than gentle reminder to all and sundry that where ministerial prerogative is concerned he holds an exemption from the restraint of turf. Indeed, this is not the first time that we have seen him venturing into other portfolios.
The fact of the matter is that while, historically, successive political administrations here in Guyana have demonstrated less than full support for media freedom, particularly through their unyielding control of the state-owned media houses there is no evidence that the views of the GPA, on their own, could have done a great deal to cause what has been quite a sharp slump in Guyana’s media freedom ratings by the FWB.
That said, one can understand Mr. Jagdeo’s rather public, rather passionate outburst on what the FWB has to say. After all, such uncomplimentary international pronouncements that might have been made about Guyana just a few years ago might not have merited too much global attention. This is not the case these days. The country’s oil wealth can be as much a source of positive attention from the international community as it can be a target for widespread negative attention if its governance bona fides, not least its respect for media freedom, are not consistent with its status as an emerging ‘global oil power.’ This is what, particularly, appears to give Mr. Jagdeo ‘the jitters.’
