Civil society activism

Over the last half century and more we have expended so much of our political energies on the issue of who should govern us, that the question of the quality of governance has received little attention. Traditionally we have been blessed with few enduring civil society groups to hold an administration to account, and those we have had, have tended to find themselves either neutralised, bypassed or ignored. All our governments have deluded themselves into believing not only that they had a right to govern, irrespective of whether that belief rested on democratic foundations or not, but also that they alone had the answers to the nation’s problems.

Administering a country such as this, never mind its small size, was never an easy proposition, but nowadays the task of governing has become infinitely more complex. No government encompasses all the knowledge and expertise needed to run a nation, and no government which has liberal democratic pretensions has the right to ride roughshod over the views of the populace in defiance of constitutional principles or other statutory rules, or our presumed liberal values. It is not a case of the government always knows best. Quite often it doesn’t.

This is a small population with a limited talent pool given the high emigration rate of educated and professional people, yet our governments with their obsession with remaining in power or achieving power have nearly always favoured loyalty over ability. With the advent of the oil and gas industry which has technical demands no administration has ever confronted before, that defect has been even more in evidence than in earlier times. Coupled with the conviction on the part of those in office that remedies for the challenges the society faces are exclusively their province, and that critics lack good faith because they are sympathisers with the opposition and are just seeking to undermine them, the country has made sluggish progress over the decades.

One of the ways of corralling a reckless administration within a framework of more rational and accountable government, is the establishment of autonomous institutions which monitor its acts and decisions. Guyana has a few of these, although their capacity to function as they are intended to do is impeded if they are not structured properly or if a government finds ways to circumvent them. That will be achieved if it has the power to make direct appointments to the body concerned, or simply disregards legal requirements. A government will get away with this if there are insufficient voices in the society to make themselves heard, or even if they are heard, if they can be effectively ignored. One of the laws which is designed to protect both people and the environment is the Environmental Protection Act, which was originally passed in 1996. As various activists have recently pointed out, in this new era of hydrocarbon activity it is in need of substantial amendment; however, even as it

stands it does incorporate certain rights as far as the public is concerned. What has become glaringly apparent since this government acceded to office is that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is perceived as an obstruction to certain development plans it has in train and which it does not want even delayed. It wasted no time, for example, in dismissing Dr Vincent Adams as head of the EPA in order to secure a more malleable body reflective of its own interests, rather than those of the nation or the citizenry.

There is an ancillary body to the EPA, called the Environmental Assessment Board. Inter alia its function is to consider appeals against waivers for an Environmental Impact Assessment issued by the EPA in relation to a project. Dr Janette Bulkan in a feature article in this newspaper recently explained that its three members are appointed by the Natural Resources Minister, and that there are no qualifications or experience listed for these. In terms of its structure, therefore, it is hardly suggestive of autonomy, while its recent decisions have left it open to the contention that it is in a conflict of interest situation. She also outlined the unhealthy relationship between the EPA and the EAB and quoted a lawyer as remarking that, “The EPA Boardroom is the venue used by the EAB. And we have to speak to the EAB via an email address that is monitored by the EPA.” The Board, it is worth repeating, is supposed to function as a review body, among other things, for the Agency’s decisions on waivers.

And if the Environmental Protection Agency hasn’t been casting around waivers like confetti recently, it has been granting them in some important instances which are open to question. Dr Bulkan related the circumstances pertaining to recent ‘public hearings’ which had been convened by the Environmental Assessment Board following the waiver of Impact Assessments for two companies which had applied for permission to build and operate facilities to serve the oil and gas industries. Four appeals came from Coverden residents and two from Le Ressouvenir residents. There were various constraints on who could speak, which were not in the Act or Regulations, and among other things were contrary to the third schedule of the former. Apart from the various criticisms of the conduct of the hearings, Dr Bulkan observed that “[i]t appeared at each hearing that the EPA staff were learning details of the two operations for the first time, details which might or might not have been included in the full project applications.” She also quoted a resident in the Zoom chat log as saying: “Wow the EPA has no idea of the basic operations of Vista [one of the companies involved]. Which mean they have no idea how to gauge the air, noise emissions. How did they really come to the conclusion that no EIA is needed?”

There is, however, a more critical case involving a waiver, and that is the one for the construction of the Demerara Harbour Bridge which the government seeks to construct between Nandy Park and La Grange. We expanded on this issue in our leader of Monday, October 6, but since then there has been a development. As we had earlier indicated, the EPA in November last year published a notice stating it had applied for an EIA from the EPA before a decision could be made to approve or reject the project. The public was told it had 28 days to make submissions on the subject.

As we related, nine months later in an inexplicable volte face, the EPA published a notice making clear it had exempted the project from the need for an impact assessment. The editorial called attention to the anxiety of the government to complete the bridge in as short a time as possible, and reversing the EIA decision would appear to be aimed at assisting in this objective.

In August, the environmentalist Ms Simone Mangal-Joly had written to the EAB objecting to the reversal of the decision not to require an impact assessment for the bridge, alluding to the fact it was now being described as a replacement and not a new construction as was previously the case. In addition to the retraction she also said in brief, that the information in the Project Summary was seriously deficient for the purpose of enabling the public to consider the proposed activity and that the reasons for not requiring an EIA were not provided. When invited to the meetings on the waivers, Ms Mangal-Joly wrote in response that the EPA had still not met its legal obligation to provide the technical reasons for the decision, and that these should be met before the hearings should be held. She had, in addition, other concerns.

Her objections and those of others seem to have had some effect. A meeting on the waiver scheduled for last Tuesday as well as one on a waiver granted to an ExxonMobil subsidiary scheduled for Wednesday was suddenly put on hold on Monday to allow the EPA more time to provide answers. EPA Executive Director Kemraj Parsram told this newspaper that the questions submitted by appellants had been forwarded to the Agency very late by the EAB, although why this happened was not made clear. In addition, the postponement decision was not published in the daily newspapers, only on Facebook.

The point about this is it is being seen as an unusual success for civil society activists, although whether they can have an impact when the hearings finally do take place very much remains to be seen. One hopes nevertheless that this may possibly be the tentative start of a new trend. These civil society voices are responding to governmental decisions relating to the environment which affect all of us, quite outside the sterile traditional framework of our politics. In the current climate and environmental circumstances the government needs to hear a host of new voices.

In a Diaspora column this month the authors wrote: “Not everybody can go to court. But everybody can tell the EPA what he/she wants. The EP Act gives people the right to question why an EIA is waived, how internal assessments are done to award environmental permits without EIAs and to make appeals and submissions to the EPA on project summaries and EIAs. The EPA has to take these into account. If you cannot get to a public meeting on an EIA, you can still write to the EPA. The letter can be simple. It doesn’t have to be a great scientific paper or legal analysis. Common sense is good enough.” A little common sense in governmental affairs would not come amiss.