Leaders on national wealth

Jul 22, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – Leaders prefer to speak about everything else, except this great national oil patrimony.  Leaders would even take a chance with corruption issues, knowing that such could have a boomerang effect i.e., hurt their own group.  Energy for everything else, but not oil.  Why?  Why is this so?

To repeat the numbingly obvious.  Oil is the biggest thing ever to hit Guyana.  Oil is the fuel that makes all their pre-election promises possible.  Oil, rightly managed, could convert from potential to consequential: money in hand for Guyanese, and much more than is needed to scrape out a decent living.  But there is no leader that makes this magnificent oil patrimony his raison d’etre, his driving passion and force, his alpha and omega of national projects.  Oil is gold, and it can garland every Guyanese.  Not just the less than 1% superrich in this country.  Not just those politicians who sponsor them.  Not those who stick tightly to them.  There are those other Guyanese who have expectations (diminished and dashed); and ideas (stirred, then suffocated); and their dejections (lived with, and devastating).  So much oil, yet so little from it.  To the ordinary man and woman.  The pensioner.  The public servant.  The penurious.  The many others of denied Guyanese, forgotten and ignored Guyanese, on the backburner of this great national oil rush.

One leading politician after another in the seat of power, and the same aspiring to that place, tense when the issue of oil surfaces.  The top performing students in the Common Entrance (NGSA) introduction to a higher world speak more effusively and powerfully about what they have achieved, now own.  The children can resonate brilliantly about what is inspiring for them more than national leaders dare to speak about this oil that should be the basis of countless inspirations, possibilities.  Nationally high performing children set the standards for national leaders about the dedication, energy, and aptitude that they should and must be about with this oil.  This only passport that takes from where Guyanese are today to the tomorrows, which the world regales itself.  For itself, but somehow not us, the Guyanese people.  The first question, the ongoing concern, is what crippling condition has taken over national leaders when oil is the matter at hand; the only one; this crude agent of change for the unprecedented, the incomparable.  When Guyanese refuse to evaluate national leaders as they are, what they represent (separate what they project from what they inject), then Guyanese are the richest people in the world in the imagination.  But the dumbest and slackest in their reality.  A closer look at these leaders is warranted.

So, they’re uncomfortable and resistant to talking unambiguously and strongly about oil.  Their preference is hedged words and slippery positions, would rather that they be given as much space on oil, and left alone.  If they cannot speak frankly, publicly, and fearlessly about oil, then there is one question that should be tabled right now, for it has so much traction to it.  Because they are so tormented today by this oil-its issues, its controversies, its weaknesses and exposures, its weight and related demand, then why should Guyanese trust them to deliver when they get into office, or retain office?  Why invest any confidence in any of them when they are holding the reins for the first 100 days?  It could be our version of that historic European 100-year war.  Going nowhere, proving nothing.  Another question: each of our national leaders should be so equipped and electrified, so as toring oratorically (and truthfully) for 100 sentences right now, 100 minutes right now, without interruption about this oil.  They are a few locals who do so almost daily, coming close to 100 sentences shared on oil.  If incumbent leaders, and aspiring ones, are petrified, turn yellow and white, when oil is the matter before them, for even 100 seconds today, what could they be about with this same frightening, knee-on-the neck, oil wealth in their first 100 days in office?

National leaders tell Guyanese about the heavens that they will deliver for them in the first 100 days in power.  But in their self-created hells (power ambitions, oil collaborations, individual subjugation) before the American oil powers-political and commercial, they are paralyzed by frights to talk freely, thoroughly, and truthfully about oil.  What is it that limits them?  Their selfish ambitions and visions, or their awareness of what they could lose, should they be warriors for country and comrades with this inheritance?  If they can’t talk now, what can they speak about then (post-2025)?  If they fear presently, how much more gutless will they be in the future?  Here’s a possible scenario involving PPP Government leaders and Exxon.

Congratulations!  Now stick to Exxon’s program like before, or the PPP’s day in office would be numbered.  It could be Routledge or the ambassador, reemphasizing the way things are, must continue.  Should the PNC or AFC triumph by some miracle (American packaged), the messengers and message are almost identical.  Welcome!  So, what is on the mind?  More oil money, benefits, are off the table, non-negotiable.  What is it going to be? Which one of today’s bold prophets, bolder speakers, will stand up then, stick a fist in the noses of the oil imperialists, the white supremacists?  Leaders either see the exploiters that way, or they see people like me as subversives and insurgents.

Bottom line: if Ali, Jagdeo, Norton, and Hughes cannot courageously commit to standing up for Guyanese now in the open air, then how is anyone of them going to summon the passion and power to standup for Guyanese behind closed doors?  I go my way.  On good terms, hopefully.

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

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• Guyanese, national oil rush, NGSA, Oil is the biggest thing, The penurious

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