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Topic Discussion III
Participation in
Democratic Decision-Making:
The Vital Voices of Women, Civil Society and
Pluralism
Room 5
(10 of 22 pages)
So in Guyana, there is a move now to do what I think the Americans have done for
years, to have an enactment for the freedom of information act. Hopefully such an act will obliged government functionaries
to give information when the request is made. Of course, within certain given guidelines. So that's a deliberate
effort to break through that kind of a resistance on the part of government to give information.
Decentralization is also very critical to participation and the comment made earlier that it allows for popular
participation or the grass roots I think is quite correct. Again, in Guyana, like in other emerging democracies,
efforts have been made to decentralize. But then again we discover that government is not very comfortable carrying
this process to its logical conclusion, because by decentralizing, you are empowering people at the local level.
So giving up power from the center to allow the local communities to develop their own initiatives, to have the
power to decide for themselves is something we find not to be very -- something that the government is not comfortable.
So inasmuch as they're trying to decentralize, we see some kind of breaks in the whole process, an attempt to slow
it down, so that people don't get empowered so suddenly and so easily. So that is a problem we face in Guyana.
The point was also made about the fear element. Now, I think this is very important. In almost all emerging democracies,
because of the history of these countries, fear is an important element preventing not totally the giving of information,
but also preventing participation through the free expression of ideas. In other words, people still are afraid
because of the dominance of executives in the lives of these countries. They are afraid that if you express yourself
so easily and so openly, maybe the secret agencies or secret agents or whatever will come after you. So fear continues
to be a hindrance to the openness that is needed for true democracy to prevail.
And the final point I want to make, Madam Chairperson, is this assumption by governments in almost all emerging
democracies, including Guyana, that governments tend to move more than civil society. In other words, the suspicions
that governments have for non-government organizations, NGOs. And what is very interesting for me is that quite
often people who get into government are people who are like you and me. These are our friends, people in school
together. Immediately they are [inaudible]. The assumption is that they know better than everybody else and that
has been the problem among government organizations, because we know that even in governments, there are some Ministers
or government functionaries who know next to nothing, but solely because of their political power that they have
been able to attain.
So this notion that non-government organizations do not know much or they are opposed to government, they seem
to have different interests other than the interests of the nation they want to serve is a very kind of troubling
development, but I don't know exactly how to respond to this. But I think participants should be looking at this
very closely and find a way to get governments to understand that the interests of the nation is what leads to
people to get into non-governmental work. So this is another issue that came across and I thought I wanted to comment
on that, too. Thank you, Madam Chairman person.
Chair: Just before you move on, I wonder if I could just ask you to say a little bit more. First of all,
I'm horrified to discover that it isn't true that when you get elected a sort of cloud of wisdom comes down on
you. I always thought -- it seemed that way to me every time I got elected, because I guess when I got defeated
it went away again. But you made this -- it's a very important point, a number of people have raised it, about
the problem of fear in participation and I know a number of societies here are dealing with this, because you've
come out of conflict and there's still all kinds of -- can you say anything more specifically about some strategies
that have been either tried in Guyana or your observations of what doesn't work in dealing with that, because that
seems to be a very fundamental issue.
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