Guyana and its oil wealth

Feb 09, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – The world would love to be declared the richest people on planet earth. All the many billions cannot be. Because that privilege, that pride of place, belongs to Guyanese.  All the expert economists and statisticians, all the veteran analysts and academics, unanimously conclude that the Guyanese people are the richest anywhere.

On this single point, there has not been any argument or disagreement from any source, local or foreign.  In the midst of glorious and mouth-watering numbers about Guyana, there is the jarring reality of most Guyanese living in the same manner.  They are poor and struggling, trying to catch up but always falling behind, with the circumstances that local life has forced them to grapple.

To our Guyanese audience, there is this simple message.  The richest people in the universe are dragging by their behinds, as they are pierced and badly wounded by the challenges and traumas of daily living in Guyana.  The wounded are not from other countries, they are those born and bred here.  Living in Guyana for the majority of Guyanese has many limbs, and they are all connected in some manner that cripple citizens further: cost of living, quality of life, and standard of living all rear their heads up and stare intimidatingly at locals. It is not what should be.  This certainly ought not to be the situation for people deemed to be economically on top of the world, regardless of the computation used, or who is doing it.

A stranger, one who is out of touch, may ask why this is so, how this could be so for the richest citizens anywhere on the globe.  How could this be the case for Guyanese who are richer per person than Americans, richer per head than Saudi Arabians and Europeans and Mongolians, some of whom (the latter) also have vast natural resources gifts. The answers are many: leadership incompetence, government impotence, individual and group malfeasance, crooked indulgence, and citizen concurrence.

Truth be told, incompetence and impotence and malfeasance and indulgence are as old as time.  But they only endure as long as they do, and as much as they do, because of citizen concurrence.  One of the lessons of history is that when citizens sit on their hands in docile resignation, then all the wrongs that can be imagined come about, take deep hold.  Another lesson is that when citizens, who empower political leaders, become so fascinated by, and fastened to, them, they (the citizens left on their own and in the dust) contribute to their own despairing circumstances.  When they allow the empowered to deceive and mislead them, citizens participate in their own impoverishment, their own woeful self-destruction, that does not have to be.

Guyana has all the oil that a country with this size population can dream of, ever hope to inherit.  The oil is real, every single barrel of it.  This is without a glance at the highly likely many billions more of oil equivalents lying under the seabed. To this point, this oil wealth has been battered by more than political mismanagement and governmental paralysis.

This great wealth has been mangled by one leadership mishap and monstrosity after another.  Secrecies and tricks have been the norm in the oil sector, with twisted political lips delivering distortions by the barrel.  Reviews and reports on the business are withheld. Oversight and controls are nothing but a joke, a worldwide embarrassment.  Instead of leaders clearing the air, they prefer cursing those who question what is going on, why things are the way they are.  This is now the standard of oil governance, the record of what stands for getting the best out of this greatest of national patrimonies. To all Guyanese, we offer a truth.  This is the family’s wealth, which is being played games with, where the few enrich themselves, while hunger and need stalk numerous homes.

• belongs to Guyanese, Guyanese, impoverishment, that cripple citizens further