ExxonMobil’s behaviour in Guyana is an attempt at colonisation – Int’l Lawyer, Melinda Janki

Nov 23, 2020 News

International Lawyer, Melinda Janki

Kaieteur News – International Lawyer, Melinda Janki believes that ExxonMobil’s relationship with Guyana amounts to an attempt at colonisation
Speaking to anti-colonialist Kingston University Professor, Andy Higginbottom, during an online forum, Janki said last month that “the main point of colonization is to take a country’s resources and to pay little or nothing. The colonizing entity co-opts the political elite, [then] the colonizing entity and the co-opted political elite rely on agents and accomplices. Together, you have an unholy trinity that completes the colonization.”
She explained that in order to get away with this, ExxonMobil has to fool people. She reminded that in the old days, European colonizers promised civilization and a better faith.
“We know what that looks like,” Janki said. “We’ve heard that. Genocide, slavery, brutality, land dispossession. Grinding poverty for the colonized; riches for the colonizing power.”
“The lie,” she said, “isn’t gonna work now. So today, the colonizers say we’ll get economic development – the holy grail of the capitalist system.”
What is promised as economic development, Janki posited, tends to turn into genocide, land grabs, grinding poverty for the colonized, riches for the colonizing power and the elites, and their accomplices and agents, and destruction of the natural world…”
Former Petroleum Advisor to the Government, Dr. Jan Mangal, had also raised concerns about this issue. He had said that the Government is welcoming the colonization of Guyana if it approves the Payara permit. At the time, he had advised the government to use the permit as leverage to convince Exxon to come to the negotiation table for a better Stabroek block deal. The Government refused, and approved the project quickly.
Dr. Mangal had told Kaieteur News “They are saying ‘welcome to the new colonization of Guyana’. We replaced ‘Bookers’ with ‘ExxonMobil’.”
Bookers, a British business firm, had operated in British Guiana, with sugar plantations being the lifeline of its wealth. The company’s economic power and reach into colonial Guiana’s affairs was so pervasive that the country had sometimes been called ‘Booker’s Guiana’.
ExxonMobil first struck a commercial discovery of oil in the Stabroek block in 2015, and has been aggressively drilling ever since, racking up 19 discoveries in two blocks, amounting to more than nine billion oil equivalent barrels. Publicly available information indicates that the supermajor expects to find at least 12 billion more barrels in the blocks it operates.
The caveat to the discovery of this oil is that Exxon is operating with an oil contract which grants it extremely generous concessions, and has been internationally condemned as unfair and lopsided. Both major parties refuse to renegotiate the Stabroek Block agreement, which global Witness said left tens of billions of dollars on the negotiating table.
Both major parties have made problematic hires in their management of the oil and gas sector, involving major conflicts of interest and or controversial specialists.
Both major parties have also signed away oil blocks under suspicious circumstances, leading to calls for independent, forensic investigations into the circumstances surrounding the awards.
After five years managing the oil and gas industry, Guyana’s political leaders have allowed the production of oil with updating a single shred of legislation pertinent to its management. The Petroleum (Exploration & Production) Act, the principle legislation to govern the sector, is more than three decades old.
As a result of Guyana’s antiquated legal framework, ExxonMobil has managed to obtain an effective monopoly over Guyana’s oil sector.

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