THE media coverage of the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) published by the Guyana arm of Transparency International lacks any form of analysis, according to the Progressive Youth Organisation (PYO).
The fact that the word “Perception” is used in the title of the index should, at the very least, allow for a caveat to be

placed, it said in a statement yesterday.
“However, with the biased reporting that occurs in Guyana’s leading newspapers such analysis is quite likely frowned upon,” the PYO stated.
It said the fact of the matter is that many leading political analysts and development organisations, including the World Bank, have outright criticised the CPI as being unfair and of little use to determine actual corruption in a country.
“Furthermore, the methodology used by TI is quite opaque. But what is most disconcerting is the media’s inability to ask pertinent questions about the index. Instead of just accepting whatever numbers and analysis that TI provides, the media has to use a critical eye to examine the methodology used by such organisations,” the PYO cautioned.
The PYO’s statement came in the wake of a screaming banner headline in yesterday’s Kaieteur News: ‘Guyana most corrupt country in English-speaking Caribbean’.
The PYO is adamant that ‘perception indices’ such as the CPI are heavily subjective. It noted that in the academic paper ‘Do people mean what they say? Implications for Subjective Survey Data’, the authors showed that responses to subjective questions have to be treated with a certain degree of skepticism.
It goes on to further state that subjective data cannot be used as dependent variables, because the margin of error is quite large. This simply translates that the perception of increased corruption may simply arise from an increased media focus on corruption and does not reflect the actual level of corruption. The paper concludes that “One must…take care in interpreting the results since the findings may not be causal.” Yet the CPI, which is subjective (Perception), is advertised as a tool to measure corruption.
In the World Bank paper ‘Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index: Whose perceptions are they anyway?’ the authors find that there are “many limitations to corruption indicators” due to large errors in aggregating the averages. It goes on to state that “This lack of precision of the scores leads one to question the feasibility of compiling meaningful rankings.”
The conclusion drawn from the paper is that it is nonsensical to compare countries with each other based on the CPI.
“Yet this is exactly what the media in Guyana and TIGI itself do,” the PYO lamented.
“It is a limitation that has even been recognized by TI, yet their local arm is either ignorant of this or has conveniently overlooked the problem,” the PYO added.
PYO, the youth arm of the governing PPP/C, also stated that “the opaqueness” of Transparency International Guyana Inc. methodology has forced it to look at a TI arm in another country. Trinidad’s TI arm has publicly stated that they receive raw data from the likes of the World Economic Forum. “The reliability of this ‘raw’ data from organisations such as these has to be brought into question. The WEF data was heavily used by the presidential candidate of an opposition party to smear the PPP. Yet the WEF had ridiculous information within its pages,” the PYO charged.
According to the WEF, Guyana has a railway system that is better than the rail system in Serbia. Every Guyanese would therefore assume that Serbia has no rail system, but the fact is Serbia has over 4000km of railway as well as city trams. “If the WEF cannot get a simple topic like that correct how can anyone trust their raw data on anything?” the PYO questioned.
“ Yet, TI’s Trinidad arm uses those data and we can only assume that so does it’s Guyana arm,” it posited.
Most importantly, that prejudices, biases, and flaws in the commentary of the TIGI are best understood when one examines who the principal officers and influential players in the TIGI are, the PYO asserted.
TIGI’s Vice-President is former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran who, prior to 1992, was widely suspected to have colluded with the PNC to suppress the production of audited public accounts and was complicit in the concealment of PNC mismanagement of government finances. According to the PYO, Mr. Goolsarran has never been held to account for his failure to conclude audits prior to 1992. In addition, his personal association with AFC leader Khemraj Ramjattan is widely known; he has made frequent appearances at AFC public events.
“Another one of the most influential persons behind the TIGI is Christopher Ram who has been a rabid critic of the PPP, and whose business transactions have landed him in court on at least one occasion for his handling of a large liquidation on ethical questions, who is a self-confessed co-author of a previous PNC manifesto, and who is also widely known to be closely associated with the AFC,” the PYO stated.
The PYO said such individuals are anti-government political activists; are totally lacking of any objectivity; are completely driven by political bias and prejudice, and have an agenda to paint the government in the worst possible light in keeping with their electioneering drive. Indeed, it is their anti-government sentiment and their anti-government pronouncements that have fed the perceptions that are captured in such flawed indices such as the one they are now seeking to promote, the PYO stated.
“The fact is that perception of corruption is mainly driven by the media. The media has an enormous ability to influence people’s perceptions of events. This ability requires them to be responsible when exercising their influence. There are many inconsistencies that exist in this index, yet our media treats it as the proverbial gospel,” the PYO charged.
“We have to know why the media do not cite these inconsistencies. Are they incapable of critique? Or, are they acting in a partisan manner with a political agenda?” it questioned.
“We, the young people of the Progressive Youth Organisation (PYO), call on all Guyanese to reject this baseless index designed to tarnish the image of our nation and affect our business prospects.
“Further, we urge the Guyanese media to put aside their bias and examine the methodology used by the Transparency International and the application, or lack thereof, of that methodology to Guyana’s situation,” the PYO added.