OCTOBER 5 last marks the first anniversary when the Telecommunications Act #18 of 2016 was effectuated, ending the telephone industry monopoly that Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Co (GTT) had enjoyed since 1990. The process of ending the GTT monopoly began a decade earlier than 2020, but there was a great deal of foot-dragging and nothing resulted. Indeed, the Guyana Consumers Association (GCA) had long been pointing out to various governments from year to year that the ATN/GTT// GoG monopoly contract was nugatory, if not void, since GTT had breached it substantially by failing to carry out substantive areas of the agreement, including establishing universal landline service along the entire coast and “telephonising” six interior locations.

Liberalisation is a process that would take about two years to complete and is not achieved with immediacy on the passing of the legislation. In the year which has just passed, the three companies operating in the industry did take some action relative to liberalisation, but the state’s activity was only modest. In our view, more could have been achieved if the state had engaged an experienced, able, creative and proactive person to further the process.

Competition is one of the great benefits of liberalisation and the ministry has been successfully educating the public in this regard. But there are a plethora of other iniquities which liberalisation would have extinguished and we remind our readers of some ot them:

With the GTT monopoly, the cost of making overseas calls was exploitative and oppressive. This bore heavily on the poor who had to make overseas calls to contact their relatives in the diaspora. Indeed, almost all Guyanese families suffered exploitation. It was believed that the GTT charges were the highest in the world. To maintain its monopoly of high costs, GTT fiercely opposed the adoption of modern technologies such as Skype or WhatsApp, which would have made costs affordable and threatened to bring lawsuits against anyone found using such. GTT even tried to invoke the help of the state in prosecuting any users of modern technologies.

Liberalisation has been able to remove this abuse. It is probably this GTT mindset that had made the Guyana industry one of the most expensive and inefficient in the world, a situation that liberalisation would rectify.

As a foreign monopoly, GTT cares far more to harvest profits than for Guyana’s national interest. One example of this was when they established a Sex Call scheme which they sold over the world. The Government and people of Guyana cried out against this immoral and illegal sex call scheme and telephone jurisdictions worldwide treated Guyana with contempt. In fact, the Scandinavian countries took a step never done before in the world of suspending telephonic contact with Guyana. It was believed that the company reaped hundreds of millions before they discontinued. The greatest irony of this episode of monopoly behaviour is when GTT refused to pay any taxes on these earnings on a variety of excuses!

GTT enjoyed duty-free status for most of their imports but the government could not exercise any effective surveillance and this opened the door to corrupt practices. And any expenditure the company made was placed against their profits. One example of GTT trying to make a killing in this regard was when they imported 29 new motor vehicles, which would have meant tens of millions of dollars placed against their profits. Owing to the brilliant detective work done by Joseph Tyndall, the head of the PUC, it was found that the alleged new vehicles were derelicts picked up from the junkyards of Miami and sprayed over and had little or no value. The newspapers carried kaleidoscopes of this story over several days.

One of the fundamental causes of the monopoly being tempted to indulge in such corrupt behaviour was that its accounts were never disaggregated, and this opened the door to the possibilities of fraud, corruption and concealment of profits. Indeed, the company resisted the disaggregation of their accounts over the years. Now that the monopoly has ended, Guyanese would never ever again wish to go through the exploitations of a monopoly.

The only debris leftover from the monopoly is the debt of US$44 million in unpaid taxes which GTT owes the government and which they could now comfortably pay since they are a very profitable company.
Liberalisation does not merely result in competition and its benefits. It prevents the advent of exploitative abuses.

Prime Minister Mark Phillips’ words encapsulate the new spirit of optimism: “Our government’s interest is to provide for an open, liberalised and competitive sector that is attractive to new entrants with the expectation that this will result in greater choices, a better quality of service and lower prices for consumers.”