Dear Editor,
Right thinking people in the 21st century do not want to remain at the mercy of tyrants and thieves that can infest the political system. To be sure, there were such people throughout the ages, but the increasing regulation of savagery requires a commensurate increase in available information. We are already aware that access to information in science and technology has multiplied the institutions of learning to try to encompass everyone born on Earth. There are still inequalities, but the ideals of the education system have largely allowed the sharing of knowledge via peer reviewed academic publication and international conferences.
In its own words, “UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, is a specialized agency dedicated to strengthening international cooperation in the fields of education, science, culture, and information.” So, “recognizing the significance of access to information, the 74th UN General Assembly proclaimed 28 September as the International Day for Universal Access to Information (IDUAI) at the UN level in October 2019.”
I have invested many years as an educator in my country. I want to stress what I have said before about the necessity of access to information in the education of the nation. As a student in the days when we still had functioning railroads, the applied maths textbooks were replete with problems about the powers, resistances and velocities of locomotives. The chemistry textbooks and examination syllabi considered the extraction of aluminium from bauxite. These were left over from colonial priorities. Why can’t we now have oil and gas extraction, finance and economics in our curricula? The obvious answer is that the government controlled institutions like the Bureau of Statistics do not release sufficient true figures to local university researchers, who will be unable to distill it into credible bits for secondary and primary schools.
Colleagues Cyril Hunte and Mike Persaud wrote about the necessity of knowing what natural resources we have. Kaieteur News (in print!) and Kiskadee Watch used up space to publish their large blank table on a variety of natural resources. Years before, I had submitted an equally big blank table on only oil and gas to the Ministry of Natural Resources to no avail. This is the state of ignorance we are kept in about what we own. I even asked the Commissioner of Information, but he used the bad Access to Information Act, with designed impunity, to give no reply and no reason for no reply to this citizen. The government feels it knows what is good for Guyanese, but what they might designate as expedience is really only a mask for a lack of accountability, which encourages similar behaviour all down the chain of command until it manifests itself in disasters like road and river transport accidents. Selective enforcement is used to keep critics quiet and perpetuate the enrichment of the few at the expense of the many.
The government and its apologists claim that information can be found in Bank of Guyana reports. This insults thinking citizens. There is no way to see how such figures are composed and distributed. They declare the amount of oil money every quarter that goes into the NRF, but refuse, e.g., to supply details of the breakdown of the extraction into oil produced and sold, oil used for operations, and losses. There must be oilfield development plans, but none are published so that citizens can track the state of our natural resource against what is extracted and the expected remainder, and the latter’s state.
Our useless Commissioner of Information should be writing something like what I am writing, as a paid advertisement in national news outlets, and taking pro-active interest in disseminating details of information that add up and balance. UNESCO says, “We set standards, produce tools and develop knowledge to create solutions to some of the greatest challenges of our time, and foster a world of greater equality and peace.” So far, we are left to perceive that the secrecies of the political bosses deny citizens this kind of knowledge and opportunity to create solutions; they look instead to colonize themselves to the foreign exploiters, making their personal fortunes, not ours.
Yours sincerely,
Alfred Bhulai
Access to Information advocate
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