Dear Editor,
When in 2010 I first raised the question of the fate of the country’s parliamentary records it attracted little attention. I persisted with the matter and formally laid a motion on it in the National Assembly in 2011. As a result it has since attracted a great deal of public attention. And rightly so, because given the profligate rate at which we are destroying important documents, we are in danger of creating worrying lacunae in our national history. Is it any surprise that these days we cannot even agree on the most basic developments in our post-independence history, including the parliamentary life of our nation?
After being told a number of untruths initially, we have now been told that the papers cannot be found and were probably lost in 2002 or 2003. It needs to be said that although the current Speaker has had a report compiled by the Clerk and his staff on this matter in response to my question, consideration of the matter is not over. There has now to be a discussion of the adequacy of the report itself and of the implications, especially as regards its unsatisfactory aspects such as unanswered questions.
That battle will be re-engaged when the House comes out of recess in October. Since the report and the comments on it have attracted several controversial and not-so-controversial observations, including contributions from two former Speakers, it would be useful to clear away some of the underbrush and irrelevant issues which have crept in.
To that end let me first say that the PPP regime first sought to deflect attention from the issue by denying my contention. The interventions of PPP Ministers including Mr Nandlall, the Attorney General (AG), in that context were intended to confuse the public. The latter, for example, waived copies of speeches I had delivered claiming that these constituted proof that the records of the proceedings were available. In fact, the situation is worse than I feared. More recent research by my office has disclosed that in addition to the minutes and proceedings of the House (the plenary) over the years 1985-1992, even the records of the Committees of the House cannot be found for the same period.
The significance of this fact may not be fully understood unless readers bear in mind that all the documents, including those for the 1950s and 1960s, periods when the PPP and interim governments were in office, were handed over to the PPP in 1992. In 28 years of the worst governance and everything else the world has ever known, the PNC never destroyed or caused national documents to go missing on such a scale.
What then is the relevance of the most recent contribution of our longest serving former Speaker, whom I regard as a mentor and friend?
The SN of September 2 has reported that, “Former speaker of the National Assembly during the PNC administration Sase Narain acknowledges that records were badly kept and that space was a problem during his tenure. He puts part of the blame on then finance minister Carl Greenidge for not making enough resources available for the upkeep of parliamentary documents.“
The inference is that I should not complain about the destruction of the copies of Hansard because the basis for their loss was somehow laid during my tenure. This is an unfortunate and unhelpful line. I have obligations as a parliamentarian and citizen. Whatever I may have done about allocations in the past cannot justify the deliberate destruction of national records.
I would simply like to underscore that however poor a state the records were in by 1992, they were handed over by the PNC to the Narain/Narine administration in Parliament under the PPP. The Speaker has now submitted a report to the effect that they were soaked in 2002 or 2003 and presumably thrown away.
Which part of that contradictory explanation points to action by Greenidge and the Ministry of Finance prior to 1992?
Why were such important documents placed on the floor in 2002 in the first place? If money could not be found to store them in 2002 the blame cannot sensibly be laid at the door of the Minister in office a decade earlier! We have been told that the PPP was able to secure funds. The problem clearly is more than current funds.
Was there an attempt to assess the extent of the water damage? How is it that the Clerk cannot say exactly when they were soaked and whether any attempt was made to save them? When, if at all, was the Speaker told and why was the matter not reported to the House and the nation?
Let me emphasise that the nation has good reason to be concerned about these events and to be sceptical of the PPP regime’s explanations. These would not have been the first records to have been either deliberately destroyed or lost by a policy of benign neglect. As I have indicated elsewhere, the PPP regime has managed to get rid of all the recordings of Burnham’s speeches and most of the documents bearing his signature in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The latter were burnt in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs car park in 1992-3. So let us not be naive.
Now let me turn to the allegation that Greenidge himself denied the Parliament funds. I note a reference to the ERP in the explanation from the former Speaker. The ERP was an economic package which corrected the economic imbalances that had accumulated between 1986 and 1988. It was not the source of the economic problems or of lack of resources to the Parliament. If a car has a serious ignition or carburetor problem and the mechanic is called in to diagnose and fix it, one would be entirely unreasonable to blame the mechanic for the failure of two bulbs or fuses during the period when the engine was down and the car was laid up, or for the passengers being late for an appointment. It is similarly disingenuous to complain about the inadequate allocation of funds when in fact inflation was so high that it was eroding the value of money being allocated. The immediate problem was to stabilize prices and the value of the Guyana currency. That process began in 1989 and was completed in 1992. Too many persons including, current and past PNC leaders, who should know better, miss the substance for the form.
That is why the PPP has been able to get away with making completely false allegations about what the PNC failed to do during its term and why they have been able to dishonestly lay claim to achievements of the PNC and claim them as their own. Claims, I might add, that have gone largely unchallenged by persons who ought to know better.
Former Speaker Sase Narine, was one of the most long-standing and close associates of LFS Burnham and H D Hoyte. For this privilege, he has been reviled and unfairly treated by the PPP regime. He would know therefore that on the matter of constitutional offices such as the National Assembly and the courts, no Minister of Finance (MOF) would take action on cutting resources without careful consultation with the sitting President. And that is as it should be.
Burnham, in particular, was very careful about the treatment of these entities. Neither during my time as Chief Planning Officer (CPO) nor as Minister of Finance and Planning, have I ever known an MOF to dismiss the claims of Speaker Sase Narain, or of Mr Shahabuddeen, the Attorney General and Minister of Justice. They had direct access to the Presidents and two things were certain in this regard. First, LFSB never bucked the advice of the state’s lawyers such as Shahabuddeen, Jackman and Bryn Pollard. Not only did he value their advice professionally but he and the many lawyers in the Cabinet, wanted to maintain the goodwill of the legal fraternity in general, a contrast with the PPP under Mr Jagdeo, in particular. Indeed, I frequently told him that he and this group of counsel constituted a veritable ‘mafia’ – it was not fully intended to be joke! So, whilst I accept responsibility for all the budgets that were presented by me, let me inform my friend Sase that on my watch the MOF never ever cut a single penny from the budget proposals submitted by the GDF or Parliament Office without first being told specifically by the President to cut or further reduce these in order to achieve expenditure targets which were proving difficult to achieve on the basis of criteria agreed by the Cabinet.
In conclusion then, let us not get carried away by the diversionists whose ultimate aim is to re-write the history of the country. In 28 years the PNC kept parliamentary documents, including those of the 1st PPP Government of 1953, of the Interim Administration of 1957, of the 1961 PPP Government and of the Burnham and Hoyte years even in the face of severe financial and fiscal crises. The report confirmed that the documents were handed over to the incoming PPP regime which then at the initiative of Frank Narain, the Clerk, received Dr Jagan’s approval for funds for a library and subsequently, external including technical assistance in 2000 for the purpose of properly storing and retrieving these documents belonging to the nation.
Dr Frank Anthony was at pains to make political capital of this fact in the parliamentary debate. How then can the complete disappearance of the documents of the Hoyte period by 2012 be laid at the door of financing, or indeed any other decisions, taken prior to 1992?
Yours faithfully,
Carl B Greenidge
