Dear Editor,
The government has to be commended for the efforts at public information it made this past week, in permitting the discussions about NICIL on television.
First there was the effective Olive Gopaul interview with Winston Brassington and then the panel “debate” involving Drs Singh and Luncheon accompanied by Mr Brassington, with Christopher Ram, Glen Lall and Adam Harris.
The event is a departure from a culture of stubborn opacity that exposed this administration to that suspicion and hostile interrogation which is the inevitable consequence of an overly-obtuse approach to sharing information with the public and their elected representatives. Perhaps it is a departure imposed by the new vigour that has come into our politics as the distribution of power changed after the last elections.
But has the government really learnt anything from the greater openness it is forced to live? We are now uncertain. As the stony silence and ‘cuss-down’ to which we had grown accustomed has apparently been replaced by the puerile cock-crow one reads in the Chronicle. Where the editorialised reports of the events boast that the press and opposition have been shown guilty of coming to conclusions based on faulty or incomplete information. The Chronicle writers seem incapable of understanding that creating the inadequacy of information is precisely what the government is and has been guilty of. And that its laziness, incompetence, or lack of consideration for the public in denying us access to facts, analysis and figures was the least efficient means of managing public perception at a time when several major and costly projects are at hand.
So the issue is not that the opposition lacked information, but that the government failed in its mission to inform and educate the public and the press and the parliamentarians. To turn around and then blame those it views as adversaries for not having information it refused to share, is at best ingenuous, at worst juvenile.
If the lessons the Chronicle claims to have gleaned from the recent initiatives are any indication of government’s own interpretation, then we have to conclude that this latest turn is not the signal of things to come, but a mere accommodation in the face of pressure and its political consequences.
Prime Minister Sam Hinds, in parliament some weeks ago, is reported to have said that questions about the Amaila Falls Hydro project which were raised by commentators and politicians were all misconceived due to the ignorance of explanatory information. He remarks triumphantly that once the information was forthcoming, critics were reduced to silence – failing to get the message that it was his failure to provide data that in the first place leads to public concern. Failing to mention that the only incomplete information available initially and up to now, was on a Sithe website. Because, for a government signing away billions, the PPP had failed to do us the courtesy of creating their own website for our enlightenment. He missed the point.
But it may be that something in our culture predisposes us to the imperious ways of diktat and edict, and thus condemns us to having, generation after generation, to prolong the colonialist/communist model of communication wherein development occurs above the heads of a subject population esteemed too daft or backward to understand or care. Or alternatively, it could be the “sitting frog syndrome” as in the case of the French Creole proverb whose lessons we are yet to learn. The lesson being that the actors in a situation often have no idea of what they are doing or experiencing because their interpretation is warped and limited.
Imagine a frog perched on his lotus leaf on the edge of a pond, minding his own business, when, suddenly, a girl rushes up to him and gives him a kiss.
“Thanks for the compliment” he croaks, and the girls drifts off in a disappointment he neither notices nor understands. As the days go by other girls rush up, seize him and give him a similar kiss. He gets accustomed to the attention after a while, and, looking at his reflection in the pond, comes to his own conclusions.
Then, a distant cousin hops by one morning, and as he approached Arnold, the frog, witnesses the surprise of Arnold locked in passionate embrace with a perfumed human female. Fearing the worst he hides under a rock. Finally, curiosity gets the better of him and he hops over to his cousin, with the question written all over his face. Arnold, in a tremor of self-satisfaction, anticipates and answers.
“You know, Boysie, it is simply the manner in which I sit on this leaf that obliges all those pretty young girls to fall so madly in love with me. Draw near, let me teach you.”
We, as humans, knowing the story of the frog becoming a Prince after a kiss, bring a totally different interpretive grid to the event. Neither Arnold nor Boysie know the story. For them it is the way you sit, the way you croak… in their universe that is how you get girls.
The PPP government, having excluded from its interpretive grid the obvious, that times have changed and that it is, and has, yielded to pressure to open up, concludes that it has now been winning a propaganda battle and proving the newspapers and the opposition wrong. It has shown that, like Arnold, it could be a principal in a story without having seized the main lesson in the event.
Donald Ramotar is one President who has had years of experience at both the local and foreign levels, as a senior journalist. He has shown a better approach to press and public relations. There are many people in the PPP in favour of more open government. Many, we may be sure, who feel that the best way to have done the bomb disposal work that could have earned it a better showing at the last elections, would have been to opt for openness and access. The problem that lies hidden under the rock, however, is whether the protection of concealment may not be better for it in the case of some deals that would frankly have been set to help friends and supporters. And thus illegal, unfair, rotten…
The final test of sincerity would be a principled openness about everything. A total transparency. Without which the round song of cock crow we now hear will fail to convince.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
