There are times when it takes an opinion that is detached from what, all too often, is our rumbustious political culture to voice truths about important national issues, we ourselves being too immersed in our prejudices to muster the honesty to speak objectively.
Outgoing United States Ambassador to Guyana Perry Holloway is harnessed by no such prejudices so that the last week’s ‘doom and gloom’ remark in his assessment of the chatter on the subject of what is now assumed to be Guyana’s imminent ‘oil fortune’ comes as no surprise.
Setting aside the prerogatives that go with Mr. Holloway’s diplomatic role he has, during his tenure here, established a reputation for a fair measure of frankness and it is in that vein that he makes the comment. It is precise and it is poignant.
Nothing, not even the vigorous celebratory environment that attended the country’s celebration of its fiftieth independence anniversary in May 2016 has ever, in our history, unleashed such a torrent of euphoria than the announcement in May 2015 by ExxonMobil that it had ‘struck’ large deposits of oil offshore Guyana. In the weeks and months ahead Guyanese immersed themselves in wildly fanciful daydreams associated with all that we had learnt, over time, about the transformational impact that oil ‘power’ in the 1970’s had brought to the OPEC countries, including our neighbour, Venezuela.
And while by all accounts the ‘early 2020’ dateline for oil recovery now appears to be a ‘sure thing,’ successive oil finds, the tenth of those having been announced a matter of days ago, have been noted by the nation with considerably greater restraint than attended the first one.
Abroad, as much as at home, Guyana’s oil future is considered a fait accompli, a ‘done deal’ in our language, so that other considerations like managing our oil wealth and the trajectory of the country’s development path in the years ahead have been fast-tracked to the top of our agenda.
All of this and more, have occupied, even dominated national discourse for much of the past three years, the chatter ranging from an assortment of perspectives on the correct blueprint for the development of the country in the oil bonanza era to whether we can avoid the so-called ‘curse’ of oil riches that afflicted other developing countries, notably some in Africa.
Discourse on the latter curse has centred mostly around issues of competence and corruption, the argument being that these could well turn out to be our so-called Achilles Heels. Sometimes, frequently, the ‘conversation’ has ventured into vigorous, even quarrelsome noises, deriving from pockets of fiercely competing prejudices. In Guyana, wherever differences of opinion on major national issues arise, however those might arise, partisan politics succeeds in finding ways to intrude.
In our particular circumstances it has been fashionable to have an opinion on Guyana’s oil find and its implications for our future. As it happens there are myriad entry points to the discourse, the most prominent of those being, the proficiency with which the political administration has been handling the negotiations with Exxon Mobil and company, the extent to which we are on the way to creating a competent infrastructure for managing an oil and gas sector, the role that oil can play in our poverty alleviation dream and the likelihood or otherwise of our ‘oil economy’ becoming infested by the uncontrollable plague of corruption. Increasingly, too, the discourse has been concerned with whether or not a sufficient sense of urgency attends the planning for the country’s forthcoming oil fortune.
There can hardly be any faulting Mr. Holloway’s urging that the incumbent political administration’s feet be held to the fire. The logic is simple. Those who govern us at this time are charged with laying the governance foundation for ‘first oil’ and beyond. Some of the decisions associated with laying that foundation are likely to remain with us in the years ahead. Getting it as right as we can first time around has implications for outcomes way down the road. If, therefore, the analysts assume a probing posture on matters pertaining to the critical preparation for our oil venture then the government’s answer should not be to throw tantrums nor to assume a paranoid posture.
That, however, is not the way this country of ours works. We have become past masters at politicizing every conceivable national issue, including those that ought to unite rather than divide us. It is a propensity that is buried deeply in our eternal political divide and its motive, all too often, is to perpetuate an enduring jockeying for political pole position. So that it is not often the easiest of tasks to distinguish the proverbial holding of feet to the fire, from simply setting those feet, and more, alight. No one, after all, is unmindful, that ‘first oil’ is not the only event of national significance that takes place in 2020.
What Mr. Holloway has done as one of his final official acts is to draw attention to an agenda that goes beyond what he describes as the “doom and gloom” that characterizes the national oil and gas discourse. Contextually he draws attention to those issues that have been either minimized or omitted altogether from our national oil and gas discourse – issues like the importance of preparing for an oil spill, however unlikely such an eventuality might be, the future relationship between Guyana and oil companies operating here, protecting our territorial integrity in the oil and gas era and managing our foreign policy in the oil and gas era – .a welcome reminder, one would think.
