OP:ED - Access to Information: Ramsonesque Absurdity, Curial Effrontery and Presidential Hypocrisy

(Kaieteur News) – Charles Ramson Sr., Commissioner of Information, answered two citizens. A year earlier, Danuta Radzik and Elizabeth Deane Hughes, two outstanding members of civil society, had asked him for environmental permits and hazardous waste records connected with the costly and poorly executed Gas to Energy project and offshore oil operations. He never replied. After the High Court ruled against him in my case, they resent their request to Ramson.

His reply, which opens “Dear Comrade,” deserves to be read by President Ali, who holds portfolio responsibility for the Access to Information Act. Ramson announced that he would deal with their letter “in truly Ramsonesque fashion.” Only a man suffering from acute insecurity, or gross self-adulation, turns his surname into an adjective. And what is the Ramsonesque fashion? A year of silence, a lecture in place of a decision, and a sneer at the judge who found against him.

He dismissed the ruling as “a decision of a puisne Judge,” and advised the two women to await “final judicial directions” from “Judges of exceptional, superior vintage” on “Guyana’s neoteric Access to Information Act 2011.” The Act is fifteen years old. If it seems “neoteric” to Ramson, it is because he has wasted thirteen years of it.