IF anything has got lost in Guyana, it is the face and presence of civil society. Poor Mr. Ramkarran! I guess because of his quiet disposition, he will not tell us who cuss him down when he wrote that civil society groups should concentrate on many touching issues rather than ones that carry sex appeal (his words).

Mr. Ramkarran got a cussing down because he touched on an issue where hypocrisy looms large – civil society groups that say that they are independent when they are barefacedly anti-government. The media and civil society need to be independent as a safeguard for democratic continuity.
In Guyana, we have lost two vital pillars of democratic life – a free, independent, private media and an independent civil society. I have penned dozens of columns on this twin loss, so today I am going to look at the proposition rejected by Vice-President, Bharrat Jagdeo of civil society’s representation on the Tender Board.

If the government should ever agree for civil society presence on the Tender Board, it still would not happen for two reasons. The first one is that there has to be a consensus among the hundreds of groups spread across Guyana. No particular group can claim they have a monopoly on civil society and that is exactly what is going to happen.

The second reason is that groups like Red Thread, Transparency International – Guyana Chapter, the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA), Policy Forum, SASOD, Help and Shelter, ACDA, TUC among others are going to use longevity and status as reasons for them being selected and deny that they have a political agenda.

These entities will go at length to argue that when you talk about civil society, they are the real society organisations and must be included in any inclusive agenda. These organisations are going to pit themselves against equally long-serving entities that they are going to dismiss as pro-government. So what we have then, according to these people, are pro-government civil society groups and the genuine, independent bodies.
This is a mirage and a falsehood, and this is where there will never be civil society inclusion on any state institution, because identification of representatives will be impossible. The Stabroek News objected to the Private Sector Commission (PSC) being on the board of the Natural Resource Fund because it says that this body is too close to the government.

In fact, the PSC is one of the priceless organisations in this country. Read Yesu Persaud’s autobiography, “Reaching for the Stars” and Father Andrew Morrison’s magnum opus, “Justice: The Struggle for Democracy and in Guyana, 1952-1992,” and the golden, courageous and phenomenal role of the PSC in stopping permanent power in Guyana is graphically described. To say that the PSC is not a genuine civil society actor is tantamount to saying that Africa is not a continent.
But it is not only the PSC that will be sidelined in the process of selecting civil society representation, so will be the trade union federation that goes under the name of FITUG. This group, like the PSC, will be dismissed as pro-government. By some weird, contorted logic, the TUC will be recognized as part of civil society.

The TUC along with the Catholic Church and the GHRA, have coalesced into an entity named Policy Forum. My sources told me that this body applied to the EU Embassy for millions for its projects. A similar amount SASOD got a few years ago.
But who or what are the TUC and GHRA? The least said about the GHRA, the better. This is not a dormant group, but one that does not exist. The TUC is Mr. Lincoln Lewis and Mr. Lewis is the TUC. During the five-month election disaster, Mr. Lewis appealed to President Granger to scrap the elections,

which early results showed Mr. Granger had lost. Here is Mr. Lewis’ appeal to Mr. Granger: “You have the power vested in your office to correct this public hijacking of Guyana’s elections, this confounded brazen highway robbery, this piracy, this buccaneering politics unleashed on Guyana.…”
Here is Mr. Lewis again on the people coming to Guyana for a better life: “Our resources exploited by others willing to undersell their labour. We also face a crisis of submerging our culture further. This threat comes from others who do not speak our language and share a common culture….”  This same TUC is seen by the Catholic Church as a genuine civil society body and by places like the Stabroek News. In Guyana, hypocrisy has no limits.