Dear Editor,
The political masquerade continues with the utterances of the Prime Minister in the National Assembly on August 3 as it relates to his government’s justification for including clauses in the Broadcast (Amend-ment) Bill of 2017 that infringe on both the freedom of the press and private enterprise. Instead of presenting the case that his government would repeal what he termed the ‘Jagdeo Act’ (SN, August 4) for its invasive intrusion on the aforementioned freedoms, he argued for maintenance, or what could be construed as a strengthening, of the very misdeed of the 2011 Act. This underscores the narrow prism in which the actors of the two main political parties operate in Guyana. In their collective minds, they exist and operate in a cordoned off political theatre where the only need to justify is to each other and to use the actions of the other as the guiding and measuring stick for proposed policy, with little or no consideration for whether or not those policies were egregious and harmful to our democracy in the first place.
This amendment bill is outright preposterous and should rightly be resisted by all in Guyana, including press and private sector organizations.
Yours faithfully,
Clinton Urling
