Media freedom, that which rightly belongs to the people and which ought, correctly, to speak for the people, is still, as it has been for as long as we have been an independent nation, manipulated by successive political administrations. They have rolled out their various incarnations of ‘media freedom’ shamelessly, their bizarre interpretations, invariably, adding considerable insult to the substantive injury. In the process the very profession of journalism, of honest and untainted reporting has been trampled upon whilst committed of the profession have had their consciences assailed by a media regime that ‘thrives’ mostly on alternately, shifting sides with the passage from one political administration to another.
Few recent ‘landmark’ media-related occurrences in Guyana could have could have been more farcical than the country’s induction as a member of an entity known as the Media Freedom Coalition, pictures of Guyana’s Minister within the Office of the Prime Minister Kwame McCoy signing on to the “coalition” in the presence of the High Commissioners of Britain and Canada, to Guyana and the then and still President of the Guyana Press Association, Nazima Raghubir. The Media Freedom Coalition, incidentally is “a partnership of countries working together proactively to advocate for media freedom at home and abroad.” Guyana, back in August 2021, had been the 49th country to ‘sign on’ as a member of the Coalition.
VP Jagdeo’s recent acerbic rant over the country’s sharp dip in the Global Press Freedom Index by the media watchdog, Reporters Without Borders (RWB), was not in the least bit surprising. Perhaps Mr Jagdeo may have been hoping that the enhanced positive global attention that we have been enjoying on account of our ‘oil fortunes’ might count for something with our RWB media freedom rating. How was he to know that Guyana’s degraded RWB rating is rooted in a cumulative assessment of our media freedom bona fides that took account of considerations that had nothing to do with our seeming metamorphosing economic fortunes? Contextually, as Guyana’s designated ‘oil Czar,’ here, one feels that VP Jagdeo might well have felt that, in the context of the country’s broader development portfolio, what the RWB had to say amounted to the media freedom watchdog raining on his and the political administration’s oil and gas-driven parade. The fact that it was the VP and not the portfolio holder, the Minister responsible for media, that ‘took on’ the RWB was a dead giveaway. Contextually, he had every right to be ‘hopping mad,’ his concern, presumably, being the seeming dichotomy between Guyana’s recent high profile induction into the global oil and gas gallery, on the one hand, and the shabbiness of its media freedom rating by the RWB, on the other. It was disingenuous of the VP to hang the fault for the RWB’s downward Guyana media freedom rating around the hapless neck of a Guyana Press Association (GPA) that continues to seek to ‘hold’ the local media freedom ‘fort’ that remains under permanent threat from government.
Here, one might add that VP Jagdeo understands only too well that the RWB’s recent downpour on Guyana’s media freedom ‘parade’ is likely to attract a good deal more global attention now that the country’s ‘banana republic’ image has been supplanted by that of a country that is ‘going places,’ at least as far as wealth accumulation is concerned.
This is what, it seems has upset the Vice President most, though he must surely be aware that there are several other resource-rich countries across the globe that find themselves ‘tagged’ for a lack of mindfulness of some of the tenets of democratic behaviour even as they immerse themselves in natural resource-driven wealth.
Beyond this, What the VP also appears not to have taken account of is the fact that there are experienced and committed global media monitoring organizations with access to reliable scrutiny of countries’ media freedom credentials that are unlikely to be easily fooled by time-worn smokescreens. Such a ploy is even less likely to succeed here in Guyana where, under successive political administrations, plain and open circumstances of blatant media freedom strangulation continue to be as plain as day.
Just over a year ago (May 10, 2022) the Stabroek News asserted in its daily editorial as follows: “The challenge that the Government of Guyana, whichever political administration holds the reins of power, will always face whenever it makes a gesture that appears designed to create a more robust culture of media professionalism, meaning, among other things, the freedom to think and to pronounce free of any kind of censorial constraint, has to do with what has long been the insidious usurpation of the prerogative of political control of much of the information that finds its way into the public space. It does so not just by ‘owning’ state media, which rightly belong to taxpayers, but also by ‘owning’ or supporting anomalous ‘media houses’ to do its information dissemination ‘will’”.
Successive political administrations have been unwavering in its embrace of this line of reasoning. It simply never changes.
Nowhere in Mr Jagdeo’s rant about what the RWB had to say about media freedom in Guyana was there any mention of the very recent, outrageous crossing of the media freedom line by government through the staging of a presidential press conference in an environment that appeared contrived to inhibit the meaningful participation by the independent media houses,
Contextually, what turned out to be a fairly rumbustious Sunday May 14 meeting of the Guyana Press Association (GPA), in an environment of a generous measure of high-spiritedness to elect a new executive, was shaped, in large measure, by what was felt to be a reported plan by officialdom to seize control of the GPA. As it happened the proceedings turned out to be a heartening public pushback against control of the media.
