We are very concerned, however, that this subsidiary of a U.S. firm would attempt to use its corporate muscle to block a loan to the Guyana government from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

The Guyanese President, Mr Bharrat Jagdeo, has described the behaviour of GT&T and its parent, Atlantic Telecommunications Network (ATN) as "blackmail". Some, we are sure, would say worse.

The problem, it seems, turns on whether GT&T, in law, has a monopoly on providing telecommunications services in Guyana.

The company insists that it does.

The government says it does not.

So the Guyanese government intends to use a US$18 million loan from the IDB to expand the country's telecommunications infrastructure. GT&T argues that this would impinge on its expansion plans and cost it money.

We make two points in this matter.

The first is that we find it difficult to understand why in this period of global embrace of the primacy of the market, an American company would press in this manner to maintain a monopoly. Competition, after all, is the prevailing orthodoxy.

Indeed, throughout the region, telecommunications monopolies are not only being challenged, but in some cases, as happened in Jamaica, there has been orderly negotiation of the end to the monopoly.

Maybe, as was the case with Cable & Wireless in Hong Kong, the state may have to compensate the company for the unused portion of a monopolistic licence, but it has become increasingly clear that in this information age with rapid growth in technology, monopoly control of telecommunications systems is not in the best interest of national economies.

If negotiations fail there is, in our region, access to law. For whatever the weaknesses and imperfections in the judicial systems of the English-speaking Caribbean, the region's governments have shown respect for the courts.

It is an avenue that we do not believe the Guyanese government has shut off to GT&T.

Which brings us to our second point.

We find it absolutely abhorrent that a company would seek to use international political levers to close off loans to a host country. It smacks of arrogance and disrespect for national sovereignty and assumes a notion of the region as so many basket cases susceptible to a little muscle from on high.

Mr Jagdeo, we believe, in this regard, is properly indignant. We, too, are.
(Reprinted from the Jamaica Observer, Friday June 21, 2002)