Copyright stabroeknews

Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo on October 16th said that the government will significantly cut newspaper advertisements as it begins to use its online procurement portal and scale-up online ads, which it believes is the most far-reaching and transparent way to spend monies for this purpose. Mr Jagdeo said that being saddled with an almost $800 million per year price tag for newspaper ads was not feasible and he believes that with today’s technology more people access information online and therefore that was where money should be spent. “One of the first manifestations you will see next year is a procurement website that will now advertise contracts around the country. So, the current way of doing this is, you put ads in newspapers mainly. So, in 2024 alone, the cost to the Treasury of putting out those ads in the newspapers was nearly $800 million that went to the newspapers. And once it goes one day in the newspaper, except for the online edition, if people go to read it, it disappears. People can’t read it the following day because it is not there,” he told a news conference held at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre. “If we have a procurement site now, once the advertisement goes up there, people can go to that site for the duration of the period the tender is valid for, … [and] it shall be on the site. So you can then go there, you can see what the opportunities are. People won’t have to buy newspapers, scan the newspaper for this. They can check from their phones, wherever they live across the country… including the Amerindian communities. They can check procurement opportunities on that site. We will amend the law to ensure that that happens and we will also be using the online media outfits to carry more of the ads, because they will reach more people,” he added. Mr Jagdeo said that online media sites have bemoaned not getting ads when their reach, in some cases, supersedes that of newspapers. “We are not going to cut out ads totally, but we can cut down the cost or give online media outlets that get no share of this ad although they reach more viewers, often than the newspaper themselves. It is a more democratic system,” he said. The Vice President singled out Stabroek News and Kaieteur News. “You’re going to hear the complaints from the Stabroek (News) and the Kaieteur News. All of them, they always say that because they believe they got a God-given right to government money and government ads. It must not be. They want efficiency and everything else, but not in that sector. So we have a duty to use government money efficiently and that would be the most efficient use of the government advertising budget,” Mr Jagdeo added. “So watch out for them going and complain. They’ve already been complaining globally; ‘Oh, the government not giving us enough money,’ as though they, you know, the people of this country, have a duty to fund their newspapers or everything else, their activities. Watch out for their complaints to start soon. But that will be something that we want to do. And it is all in keeping with what the President said in his inaugural address: ‘I want to make the system more transparent more accessible to all Guyanese’. Because definitely that would be accessible; everybody from their own phone. They don’t have to go and hunt down newspapers to look for ads any longer. That would be a more efficient system. We are already working on it.” It is unclear how Mr Jagdeo arrived at the conclusion that Stabroek News has been complaining “globally” that the government was not giving it enough money. It is another one of his flights of fantasy or simply poor understanding. What Stabroek News has complained about is the failure of the government to abide by the terms of its credit arrangement with the newspaper and to pay the monies that have been withheld for a large part of this year for services provided. This default by the government has been drawn by Stabroek News to the attention of the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) and was cited on October 17th in the session of the 81st IAPA General Assembly in the Dominican Republic addressing freedom of the press and information. What Mr Jagdeo raised on Thursday has always been on the radar of the PPP going as far back as the tenure of the late Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon. There is no problem at all with broadening the media through which the government advertises tender notices although how it is done will certainly be the subject of examination. In addition to its print edition Stabroek News is also widely available digitally and has an unparalleled reputation here for credibility in addition to the fact that it publishes a business edition. So while diversifying the platforms for advertising is understandable, sensible decisions still have to be made on value for money and where it is channelled. It should also be noted that it was Mr Jagdeo who originally transgressed IAPA’s Declaration of Chapultepec when he ceased advertisements to Stabroek News in 2006 for 17 months following the elections at which the AFC gained five seats. It will not go unnoticed that this renewed interest in where ads are to be placed comes hard on the conclusion of another election and the rise of the We Invest in Nationhood which gained 16 seats. Mr Jagdeo has therefore had a history of oppression of the press and the use of government advertising as his weapon. During the period of the loss of advertising, Stabroek News had diligently tracked how ads had been directed in 2008 to the Guyana Times founded by Mr Jagdeo’s friend. While Mr Jagdeo made the announcement, this is really a matter for the President of the country who is effectively the minister responsible for this sector. As with the Access to Information controversy which remains unaddressed, it is left to be seen what President Ali will do amid the longstanding assurances that his government fully respects press freedom.