H@rd Truths by GHK Lall – Who in Guyana has any say on Guyana?

Feb 21, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – The learned Guyanese jurist ruled that the court cannot direct Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to produce a piece of paper confirming the existence of some risk coverage.  If a senior court in Guyana has no such power, then who has?  Is it Emperor Ali? He promoted himself since president is now a shade on the paltry side.  Good going, sir!  But I am still wrestling as to whom and what institution in Guyana has any jurisdiction of matters pertaining to oil.  This oil now seems to have a life of its own, running along at its own pace, and in whatever scurrilous space that is decided by the governing power in Guyana.  It is not Emperor Ali.  Nor His Supreme Majesty Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo.  Take a fortifying breath and absorb what those two glorious Guyanese leaders have to say about this oil, and it is always about what pleases the resident Viceroy, Alistair Routledge, and his controller, Grandmaster Darren Woods in Spring, Texas.  No matter how nuanced the language, how clever the construction, what comes out of Ali and Barry is that Exxon’s feathers must not be ruffled.

If our judiciary is this limited over the production of an insurance/guarantee document, then its reach has been amputated.  In a touch of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the judiciary may have incarcerated a lobe in its mind.  When a member of the judiciary could develop this curious loyalty to the law, then the issue before me is not about how this country is being run, but who is running it.  Guyana’s parliament removed itself from the decision-making equation.  Guyana’s most sensitively positioned institution (the EPA) has come up with, and follows, its own formula of regulatory oversight.  Gently presented, it is what favors Exxon.  Exclusively.  Every time.  Every circumstance that has contradiction, brings clashing, brings down Guyanese.  Smile, Alistair, smile.

What follows is up heaving, but has to be said.  I think that we are better off without this oil.  Forget about caviar and champagne.  Bake and salt fish are fine with me.  If the government, with the backing of the judiciary, moves to take away the flour and the fish, all is still well with my soul.  For, if and when this country’s judiciary proclaims itself to be so unresourceful, to be without the requisite perspicacity and sagacity, to extract a letter of the alphabet from any word, and make it work advantageously for this country, then this is not a country anymore.  This is a classroom for Exxon to teach Guyanese their new way of life.  Subjugation.  This is a swank barroom where the people at the bar guzzle, and the people with brooms in their hands sweep.  The former is white with their fine brown and black friends; the sweepers are that lower species of animal life, Guyanese natives delighted to mix drinks, fetch firewood, and fall over themselves in abject prostration.

The question still stands: who is running this country?  Whose word counts?  Whose unmatched power is now all too obvious?

The parliamentary is useless.  The judiciary is helpless.  The environmental agency is toothless.  And the presidency is formless, powerless, and visionless.  Did I say that the opposition is clueless?  Civil society, for the most part, is voiceless.  The legal fraternity is shameless.  The private sector is meaningless.  The professional class is thoughtless.  What in God’s name, or what the hell, do we have here for a country, and who is leading it, deciding for it?  By the process of elimination, I am staring at a blank slate, a wilderness state of utter grimness.  What the hell am I doing here?  Again, why do I even care, other than to inspire Vice President Jagdeo into long bursts of the profane, his now characteristic monstrousness.  He may be the mother of most things that are wrong in this country, but he is still a brother.  I regard the guy as well as I would a cobra.  A hissing, spitting one.  He can be such a power locally, but such a figure of fright, such a shell in a suit, before the oilmen and their diplomatic confederates.

Having dealt frontally with that, the opposition in Guyana, cannot be those few citizens who see what is going wrong, who are alarmed, and who actually say something in public about their fears and concerns.  Those disagreeing and objecting in Guyana cannot be a dwindling handful of letter writers, and about some of whom there are doubts. About where their hearts really are, as if they are waiting for a call.  Or a few honest lawyers and activists.  Or a few patriots, to whom the honor can be ascribed.  They are too few, too miniscule and minor; too much of a minority.  But if their might is in moving and trying, regardless of the failing and falling, then there is the rarest of honor in such.  Perhaps, that explains my presence.  But the nucleus needs more muscle to fight Exxon.  Still the fight must go on, if only to call the attention of the world to the homemade tragedy that is Guyana.

Every piece, every plank, every pillar in Guyana has succumbed to the Exxon juggernaut.  The PNC was first, the PPP is an even better appeaser.  There has since followed a galaxy of Guyanese groovers and grovelers (as identified above) all prostrating themselves before the hard hand of the foreign subjugator.  Most Guyanese are not men.

Making most of them into mice insult mice.  Exxon has its undeclared war against the Guyanese people, against Guyanese interests, and it has all these Guyanese from top to bottom falling like dominoes.  Since Guyanese have surrendered the will to be masters of the national destiny, Exxon ensured that it is here to dictate the way forward. Communism has its total controls.  Capitalism has its capital crimes.  It is the disastrous fate of Guyanese to live with both at the same time.  This oil curses.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• Darren Woods, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), GHK Lall, governing, Guyana

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