Following an Alliance For Change press release condemning the replacement of the Co-ordinator of the Guyana-Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (GY-EITI), Dr Rudy Jadoopat, the government on Saturday issued a defence of the decision while confirming that his successor will be Dr Prem Misir.
Who heads the GY-EITI matters a great deal insofar as that person is entrusted alongside the various stakeholders with ensuring fidelity to the tenets of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) which is the internationally recognised standard for openness as it relates to the proceeds from the extraction of all natural resources. According to its website, the EITI Standard requires the release of information along the extractive industry value chain from the point of extraction, to how revenues make their way through the government, and how they benefit the public.
“By doing so, the EITI seeks to strengthen public and corporate governance, promote understanding of natural resource management, and provide the data to inform reforms for greater transparency and accountability in the extractives sector”, the website stated.
Given the poor governance and deep-seated corruption Guyana has experienced since independence, membership of this body is vital to making certain that all of these transactions are logged so the public is well aware of money flows pertaining to the extraction of these non-renewable resources.
This would have been so even before the advent of oil but there is now greater urgency considering the mind-boggling returns from the industry – US$607m this year – and the thicket of transactions that underpin this figure all along the value chain.
Transparency is not a quality that has suffused public life in this country and the private sector has been even more resistant. Indeed, last year gold miners balked at the provision of key information on their transactions and appeared on the verge of exiting the local multi stakeholder group under the GY-EITI until better sense prevailed.
However, it is the government which has the premier role in ensuring that full information is available on the oil and gas sector and the replacing of Dr Jadoopat underlines the concerns that have been raised frequently in these columns that the government’s intention is to control information release and to place its preferred candidates in all key positions to the exclusion of others.
Speaking to the Sunday Stabroek, Dr Jadoopat made the damning allegation that the Minister of Natural Resources has attempted to dictate to GY-EITI.
“There is no one who can point fingers at me and [the] quality of [my] work anywhere in the world and even now and I have been the EITI head for the past five years and there is no record of anything except the Minister is not happy with me being straightforward. I stick to the EITI standards and I cannot violate them as a professional so when the Minister or whoever tells me to do anything which is in violation of the standard I will not do it.
“He has given me instructions to do certain things and I refused because it was in violation of the standard and my job is to uphold the standard and that is what the Government of Guyana committed to – uphold the EITI standard, embrace it and implement it – and my job is to make sure that we implement the EITI international standard as it is,” he told the Sunday Stabroek.
He also asserted that the Minister had been demanding that alternate members of the Multi-Stakeholder Group not be invited to meetings, which is a violation of its terms of reference.
Any intrusion of the type raised by Dr Jadoopat will put Guyana’s relationship with the EITI at risk at a time when the country could ill-afford it although that risk might be of negligible interest to the government as exemplified by its impending decision to appoint Dr Misir. The Natural Resources Minister Vickram Bharrat in his statement on Saturday said the position of Co-ordinator of GY-EITI was advertised and that Dr Jadoopat was among those who had applied but that Dr Misir had been chosen. Most unusual. It would be interesting to know the names of all the persons who applied for this position, who evaluated them and who made the final decision. In the interest of transparency this information should be released by the Natural Resources Ministry.
One would have thought that since Dr Jadoopat had been in the position for five years during the formative period of relations with EITI that on reapplication he would have been a strong candidate for reappointment. He did point out to the Sunday Stabroek that “We are in the middle of the third Guyana EITI report and I am the only person who’s actually involved in that process because the Deputy Coordinator resigned since December [2021]. So it is very troubling to know that report is in process and in the middle of it. Apart from that, Guyana is also in the middle of the first EITI validation process and that is by the international body from Norway and we are in the middle of that also and I am the only person [working on that].
“So at this point to make a change it is absolutely, in my opinion, absurd and nonsensical for a decision to be made like that in the middle of the reporting process and also the validation process”.
Enter Dr Misir. Minister Bharrat’s Ministry made one notable omission in the biodata it supplied on Saturday on Dr Misir. It neglected to state that Dr Misir once ran the Government Information Agency under the Jagdeo administration and later served in the Office of the President. During that period he was one of the chief propagandists for the Jagdeo administration defending it against all manner of transgressions including a most egregious assault on press freedom – the withdrawal of state ads from Stabroek News.
Aside from the fact that there is nothing in his résumé that would make Dr Misir a more suitable candidate than his predecessor he has operated from within the deep recesses of the PPP/C while it was in government and to expect that he would now ensure full openness in this crucial natural resources sector is a bridge too far. His appointment would be most inappropriate and could be the death knell of relations with EITI.
It is unfortunately this same type of appointment that likely awaits the country in relation to the Natural Resource Fund board amid the flawed legislation that underpins it.
