Oil – five years on
Dec 22, 2024
Kaieteur News- Five years as an oil producing nation, and Guyanese are told that they have to wait another three years to see some real money from their oil wealth. One leader offered that promised three-year sweetener to pacify citizens who grow increasingly unhappy with what they get from their oil. He has developed a well-earned reputation to shift things to suit his own objectives, evade owning up to mistakes made. Who would be so reckless as to put any trust in that 2027 promise? Many have been made before, and most of those promises have come to nothing. With a national jewel that is a nugget as big as a mountain, it is dangerous to have such a leader near that oil. The facts of Guyanese life stand as proof of collective leadership failure, local leadership cowardice and, even, leadership betrayal.
Four leaders circle around this oil, all competing to see who could be weaker than the others. Leaders circling ought to impress an image in the eye of vultures wheeling overhead over a carcass. It is what they have reduced the hopes and aspirations of Guyanese to, with their dissembling and obfuscations on where they stand with this oil. The leaders of ExxonMobil can trumpet to global audiences about how much of a world class property Guyana’s oil is, and the best that Guyana’s leaders can do is give their citizens banana peels on which to walk. One speaks of 2027 and how much more there could be, and another is all about much he would set in motion over a year from now, should local political circumstances help him. ExxonMobil’s executives speak with authority of their company’s rich present and its brighter prospects, based on Guyana’s oil. Guyana’s political stewards are still speaking in feeble terms of what has not been, and what may be. Five years of oil production, and Guyana’s four main leaders carry themselves like men whose best asset is a begging bowl.
Three words: sanctity of contract, have been used as the hole in which the leaders of the Government of Guyana hide themselves. They pay short thrift to, look with disdain on, the contract that they have with Guyanese, what they committed to do if trusted with power. The power that Guyanese put in the hands of their government, in its leaders, has been reduced to the crippling. Sanctity of contract is now the supreme law of Guyana, more inviolable than Guyana’s Constitution. Those three words, sanctity of contract, have been used by Guyana’s Government and its leaders to convert this country from an oil producing country to one enslaved to ExxonMobil. The lust for power of government leaders has greased the wheels of the barter that gives sanctity of contract its lofty stature. Guyanese have been reduced to pawns in a bigger political and corporate game, forced to be content with the paltry returns that trickledown to them.
Three more words, renegotiate the contract, have shown citizens what kind of leaders they have. Five years of oil scraps, four leaders pleased to crawl before ExxonMobil, and three words (renegotiate the contract) that can do so much for this country resisted with excuses and nifty dodges.
Two Americans, ExxonMobil’s CEO Darren Woods and Guyana Country Head Alistair Routledge, sit like kings enthroned over this country’s oil. We appreciate that they must be partnered with, but under no circumstances should any of Guyana’s four top national leaders should be kneeling in homage before the two of them. Sanctity of contract is kneeling, rebuffing efforts to renegotiate the contract presents a picture to the world of them crawling on their bellies. This state of national impotence must not be condoned any longer, when there is that one bitter reality.
One reality that hangs over this 5-year-old oil producing country is of hungry Guyanese. Those condemned to exist on the margins, the gullible and impoverished who only now see-through the deceptions of leaders. This must not be in a country producing 650,000 barrels of oil daily. This must change now, or the next five years will be worse. Leaders work to get rid of the repulsive ExxonMobil contract, or Guyanese move to get rid of them legitimately.
(Oil – five years on)
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