When secrecy can hurt

October 7, 2013 | By chris | Filed Under Editorial

Guyana is fast becoming as secretive as some of the most closed societies in the world. Indeed, secrecy was the order of the day in those state-run societies where the state determined what was good for the people and where production was disposed of at the behest of the state. The tenet was that the societies would be run according to the principle of ‘from each according to his want, to each according to his need’. It therefore meant that if a man produced more than he needed then that surplus would be controlled by the state. It would be given to those who appeared not to have the wherewithal to produce according to their needs. Of course, there were immense failings here. People never produced to their optimum and most of the efforts were concentrated in the family. The state stagnated because the driving force of development—the profit motive—was missing. In the end, communism collapsed and the grandiose principle of the richer supporting the poorer went through the window. The government took the society into its decision making processes and caused the people to have a say in whatever plan it conceived. Guyana seems to be caught in the time warp. Its people wake up in the mornings to be confronted by a brainwave of some government official. The society is then asked to make the brainwave work. If it fails then the fault rests with the people. Guyana has been confronted with a series of bright ideas and all of them have landed the taxpayer into some financial difficulties. Such is the situation that in real democracies, the governments would have had to resign over what the people would have seen as a waste of their taxpaying dollars. We start with the Skeldon Sugar Factory. This came into being because Guyana simply could not get out of sugar. For one, it represented the bulk of the political support of one of the major political parties in the land. To rid itself of sugar would have been, for that political party, to rid itself of a large political base. So, the project became Guyana’s largest investment. Three years later, this investment is still to provide the desired yield. Instead of lowering the cost of production the investment has seen the drastic lowering of the volume of production to levels unheard of even when the smaller sugar factories were struggling in the face of strikes and sabotage by disgruntled workers. The government is less than candid about the state of affairs. It is mum on the rate of repayment of the loan to fashion this new sugar factory; it is mum on the declining labour force and it seems incapable of determining the root cause of the problems that affect the sugar factory. Then there was the decision to reintroduce hydroelectric power to Guyana. This project was touted to be three times larger than the sugar investment. From the outset there were questions. The award of the contract was questionable and the time granted for the construction of the hydroelectric road was most inadequate as was the cost of the project. For two years the nation was provided with various deadlines and when these were questioned the authorities made charges of anti-government and of pandering to the opposition. It turns out that the criticisms were justified and the government remains as secretive as ever. It is as if the projects have ground to a halt. In any society where the government is using public funds, that government would feel beholden to the people to explain every delay, unless the government is a dictatorship. There is so much that the nation needs to know and where the information is lacking then the political opposition acts. We have had cuts to the budget because the opposition argued that the government refused to adequately explain the need for the expenditure. What is worrying is that the government is still steeped in the dictatorial mode even though the society has changed. Perhaps it is because we still use the same old politicians who are all steeped in the ways of secrecy.