We are not surprised by Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh’s robust response to this newspaper’s coverage of some elements of the April 2010 Country Report on Guyana by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). It would have been surprising if he had been indifferent to a report in an internationally recognised publication that questions the authenticity of figures on the country’s economy, the production of which is the responsibility of his ministry.
The reason for our editorial titled ‘Serious Charges: The Economist Intelligence Unit Country Report on Guyana’ and published last Friday, was to draw both public and official attention to the incredulity of the assertions made in the report and to urge that both government and the private sector comment publicly on those assertions. Public comment, our editorial asserted, was not only “warranted” but “obligatory.”
Like Dr Singh, we too are of the view that the EIU’s reporting would be “expected to be objective and completely prepared”. We had no reason to believe that this was not the case on this occasion. It has to be said too that nothing that we happened upon in the report persuaded us that the EIU may have been “misled and misinformed.”
The Minister of Finance is clearly of a different view and if the GINA release constitutes a reliable account of his response to the assertions made in the EIU report, he certainly went to town on the document.
Setting aside the vitriol attributed to Dr Singh in the GINA release, his response repudiates the EIU’s assertions about the credibility of official statistics, pointing out that the numbers “can be verified directly with those sectors.” The state’s “numbers” on the economy, Dr Singh was quoted as saying, are sourced from the Guyana Sugar Corporation, Guyana Rice Development Board, Guyana Geology and Mines Commission – and unspecified “other data sources.” That is as far as Dr Singh’s substantive response to the EIU Report goes; on the issue of the EIU’s assertions, that is.
The GINA version of the minister’s response pillories the “one or two political aspirants and spokespersons and, its final paragraph, lambastes Mr Christopher Ram to whom reference is made in the EIU report.
Predictably, perhaps, the GINA statement quotes Dr Singh as stating that “the insinuations made by Stabroek News on the accuracy of the statistics are a shameless assault on the integrity of the professionals and functionaries in several agencies throughout our country. This newspaper made no “insinuations” nor any other comment or suggestion whatsoever “on the accuracy of the statistics.” Our lead story, headlined: ‘Private sector frustrated with govt policy’, reported factually on some of the contents of the report. Our editorial sought to do two things. Firstly, it sought to bring to official and public attention the particular assertions being made in the EIU report. Secondly, it sought to urge that on an issue of such magnitude an official response was important.
Whatever the minister’s views on the EIU report we find his charge that our report contained “insinuations… on the accuracy of the statistics” baffling and, in our view, without any sound basis. Charges of the nature of those made in the EIU report are serious ones and in a sense we are not at all surprised that Dr Singh was not exactly pleased with the ‘message’ which we brought. Having said that, blaming the messenger is not the fairest of ways for the finance minister to sate his anger.
