Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

The long and te­dious lines at Gov­ern­ment of­fices to ap­ply for doc­u­ments such as birth pa­pers and dri­ver’s per­mits can be avoid­ed if the State has the will pow­er to adopt a more tech­no­log­i­cal ap­proach to gov­er­nance.

This ac­cord­ing to Caribbean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union (CTU) pres­i­dent Melford Nicholas at a press con­fer­ence dur­ing the CTU’s Fu­tureScape cel­e­bra­tion for their 30th an­niver­sary yes­ter­day.

Nicholas is al­so the Min­is­ter of In­for­ma­tion, Broad­cast­ing, Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions & In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy in An­tigua and Bar­bu­da.

In the cur­rent tech­no­log­i­cal age, many of these te­dious tasks can sim­ply be done at the push of a but­ton or from the com­fort of your home. How­ev­er, these sys­tems are not be­ing used to their full po­ten­tial in the re­gion.

Nicholas be­lieves such tech­no­log­i­cal ap­proach­es to gov­er­nance is long over­due.

“We have fall­en be­hind in the rest of the glob­al com­merce…We can no longer con­tin­ue with the old sys­tem of gov­ern­ment with the old slow bu­reau­crat­ic process­es. The need is there.”

He said mon­ey is not the on­ly lim­i­ta­tion to im­ple­ment­ing these changes as some gov­ern­ments lack the willpow­er to do so.

“It comes down to the will of the heads of gov­ern­ment. If it is their will that it hap­pens, it will hap­pen,” he said.

He cit­ed a re­cent project un­der­tak­en by his gov­ern­ment to pro­vide dig­i­tal Iden­ti­fi­ca­tion Cards to cit­i­zens. De­spite re­quir­ing the en­try of decades of in­for­ma­tion in­to a data­base, the project on­ly cost them some $1.5 mil­lion US.

How­ev­er, when in­cor­po­rat­ing tech­nol­o­gy in­to gov­er­nance, Guyana’s Min­is­ter of Pub­lic in­for­ma­tion Cather­ine Hugh­es cau­tioned, cul­tur­al aver­sions must be tak­en in­to con­sid­er­a­tion.

She said in her coun­try, cit­i­zens were out­raged when a tele­phone com­pa­ny an­nounced they were go­ing to stop send­ing out hard copies of bills, re­plac­ing them with dig­i­tal copies.

A sim­i­lar sce­nario oc­curred in T&T re­cent­ly when the Pi­ar­co In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port switched to an elec­tron­ic pay­ment sys­tem for their car park.

For the past three days, the CTU has been cel­e­brat­ing their 30th an­niver­sary with an event called Fu­tureScape un­der the theme “Dig­i­tal Tran­si­tion: Do It.”

The event im­mersed stake­hold­ers from across the re­gion in a re­al-time tech­nol­o­gy ex­pe­ri­ence, which demon­strat­ed the ef­fi­cien­cy, trans­paren­cy and con­ve­nience of a ful­ly in­te­grat­ed Caribbean.

It al­so in­volved heads of gov­ern­ment and of­fi­cials from across the re­gion en­gaged in dis­cus­sions to­wards this goal.

Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al of the CTU, Bernadette Lewis said it was done to fos­ter col­lab­o­ra­tion.

“What we are try­ing to achieve re­quires mean­ing­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion by the Prime Min­is­ters, heads of gov­ern­ment, they have to cham­pi­on that cause. They have to cham­pi­on that cause of 21st-cen­tu­ry gov­er­nance.”

Nicholas al­so said much of what was seen at the event can be im­ple­ment­ed with­in the next two years in CTU mem­ber coun­tries if the right ap­proach is tak­en by re­spec­tive gov­ern­ments.