Using the opportunity here to raise multiple issues, instead
of the usual one – not that they are unrelated.
Every now and then you see a social media post (none of
which will be repeated here) and you wonder whether the marketplace of public
opinion is indeed having the impact of leveling off extremes – of separating
wheat from chaff, sheep from goats, lambi from freshwater conch.
The idea behind freedom of expression is that out of the
unmediated exchange of news, information, creativity and opinion, there emerges
an eventual equilibrium that takes people closer to rational conclusions,
facts, and enlightenment.
This is the exact opposite of what propaganda seeks to
achieve – especially when it seeks to stifle dissent by creating conditions for
an imbalance in information flows. This is also the dynamic that disinformation
sets out to undermine and destroy.
Our authoritarian instincts clearly also do not sit
comfortably with rights and freedoms. Freedom of expression is thus not readily
recognisable, in such a context, as a multi-pronged process involving not only
the dissemination of expression, but an ability to seek out and to access
expression.
Recent discussions on the nature of our Freedom of Information
Act exposed a lack of understanding of such a scenario. Access to information
is, in fact, a freedom of expression issue insofar as such a right identifies
an ability to also research and to acquire information – official information
in particular.
The Media Association’s (MATT’s) nuanced response to the
challenge was thus spot-on, and the ensuing official responses indicative of an
instinct toward the authoritarian.
All of this long-windedness to come to another, as I said
not unrelated, point: The perpetual exclamation that “Caricom is ah waste of
time” and has achieved nothing in its 46 years.
I have spoken with multiple regional decision-makers in the
Caribbean who have, in not so many words, expressed such an uninformed view –
despite the existence of over 20 institutions, and numerous areas of functional
cooperation that keep some of them in office.
Two developments reminded me of this recently. The first
relates to online responses to the news that internecine conflict arose during
a caucus of Caricom heads of government in Saint Lucia last week when the
subject of the Caribbean Development Fund (CDF) came up.
The other has to do with the fact that the people at the
Carifesta Secretariat in T&T had lumped Caricom journalists with “foreign”
journalists in tailoring the event’s media accreditation process.
First, the CDF issue. It is disturbing that people who know
more than I do are not chiming in on the question of imbalances (“disparities”
is the word used in the official literature) in the Caricom Single Market and
Economy (CSME) process, and what the CDF was designed to achieve.
There is need for a mature discussion on this – for all 15
member states to take a “deep breath” on this issue, as Dr Rowley put it,
because Jamaican intransigence (even as the Golding Report proposes a strategic
opting out of it all) can provide an opportunity to revisit the old MDC/LDC
formula.
More on that another time. Now on to Carifesta XV. It has
taken the patience required of my very first point – acknowledging a
marketplace that mixes sense with nonsense – and an understanding of point two,
regarding the ignorance that prevails on things Caricom, to have not lost my
cool when I realised that the Carifesta folks in Port-of-Spain had not
instinctively recognised the event as a quintessential Caricom activity.
Further, that the region’s single market process, to which
we are bound both by domestic legislation (the Caricom Act and others) and
international law (the Treaty of Chaguaramas) accords (qualified) equal treatment
to all nationals of countries signed on to the revised treaty.
This forms the basis of the advocacy some of us have engaged
in over some rather hard years to promote recognition of categories such as
media professionals and entertainers (“artistes”) as worthy of such status. But
there is also an accompanying moral obligation.
Thanks to Keith Subero, in particular, for helping to have
the initial Carifesta error corrected – if it was considered to be an error
based on ignorance in the first place.
This country’s gradual passivity on Caricom affairs over the
years has indeed been taking its toll. So much so that the marketplace of free
expression on things Caricom is served by rather dim lighting at the moment,
both here and in our immediate neighbourhood.
Originally published in the T&T Guardian - July 10, 2019
