ExxonMobil’s billboards

Sep 25, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – ExxonMobil is strutting its stuff in the face of Guyanese.  According to Guyana’s leading oilman, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, the company is well within its rights to put up its billboards.  The PPP/C Government has been loath to go anywhere near them.  Thus, the company’s billboards hang over Guyanese heads, while the drive is on to brainwash the minds of citizens.  During the first Cold War, the US was concerned about communist infiltration and the damage done to its people and institutions through brainwashing.  In that fevered atmosphere a motion picture about the consequences of brainwashing like the Manchurian Candidate took off, gained many fearful believers.  The irony of today is that America’s ExxonMobil is the one doing the brainwashing of locals with its half story, half truthful, billboards, and no Guyanese, other than this paper, has had the guts to offer a word of protest.  Even Guyana’s all-powerful Vice President Jagdeo has walked on eggshells around those billboards.

The first ones were about how much Guyana is benefiting from the ExxonMobil-Guyana oil partnership.  Percentages and statistics were the tools of choice employed by ExxonMobil.  They were soon exposed and became so embarrassing to Jagdeo that his hand was forced.  They should either correct or take down those billboards, as they are not accurate.  He conveniently forgot that his flunkeys were busy selling those same billboards as representing the full and accurate story of how much Guyana was getting as its share from the oil wealth.  With the wind at its back, ExxonMobil next went on the attack with more billboards.  So many Guyanese trained, so many hours invested, and so many billions spent.  In the world in which ExxonMobil operates, nothing is ever as it seems, or so straight as to be trusted.  What the company left out from its latest billboards was that the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement allowed ExxonMobil to recover what it spent on training.  It is not helpful to ExxonMobil’s public relations efforts to be constrained by such inconveniences, to being a stickler in sharing the whole truth and nothing but.

ExxonMobil engages in these kinds of misleading exercises, because its senior executives know that they have the entire crop of local politicians where they should be.  Timid and toothless, and not possessing anything resembling a genuine bark.  Hence, there is no reason to be careful, to fear such defanged, trapped political poodles.  So, ExxonMobil does as it pleases, because the road in front of it could not be clearer.  For their part, most Guyanese are content to hide behind a shield of PPP/C Government political correctness.  The result of this is that there only a tiny handful of Guyanese standing up and saying out aloud that what ExxonMobil is doing is wrong, and that it should not be given such free rein to cross these lines, at will.  The government is saying little about the new billboards, the opposition picks its steps (and words) with the greatest delicacy, and Guyanese who should be outraged seek shelter in silence. This is the level of unhealthy fear that is present in Guyana.

A foreign entity comes into the local space and insults the intelligence of Guyanese, and there is not even the whimper of an outcry.  But let there be some issue of dispute involving ethnicity or elections or corruption, and Guyanese find their voice and an unbelievable degree of vibrancy.  This is the kind of self-destructive existence that finds favour with Guyanese imprisoned by the past, and liking where they are.  The great wealth that is theirs, and which is being used against their interest by ExxonMobil (the deceptions in the billboards speak their confirming language), is of little inspiring value to them.  The misleading billboards of this crafty American company have another side that, though subtle, is potent.  Those deceptive billboards are a manifestation of ExxonMobil’s power in Guyana and over Guyanese.  We make the argument that those billboards always seem to leave something out that is to the disadvantage of Guyanese.  To some extent, those ExxonMobil billboards are nothing but calculated emblems of the ExxonMobil machine running rampant in Guyana, its great reach here and the nuanced control exercised over most local minds.

• communist, Editorial, infiltration, Vice President, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo