The Government Information Agency (GINA) has noted the concerns raised by the Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM) with regards to the issuance of radio licences here in Guyana. The concerns, which were carried in an article on a locally based pro-Opposition online news entity, seem definitive pronouncements with regards to local policy here.

While GINA is cognisant of the freedom of expression that now prevails in Guyana and which facilitates the enabling environment for the ACM to rush to state its position on the issue, it is astonished that the said ACM has not pronounced, in any way, on the repeated attack on press freedom perpetrated on the Agency by the combined Opposition here through their actions of budget cuts.
On April 18, 2013, as was the case in 2012, the Alliance for Change (AFC) in collaboration with A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) used their combined one-seat Parliamentary majority to deny GINA of its budgetary allocations. This clearly put at risk the livelihoods of the Agency’s dedicated staff, many of whom are breadwinners of their family, and threatens the constitutional rights of Guyanese to be informed.
GINA finds it extremely strange that, the ACM, in making its pronouncements, instead of trying to understand the process of issuing of licences, has been silent on the suppression of press freedom in Guyana by the APNU/AFC following the budget cuts in 2012 and has taken the same position thus far in 2013.