Introduction
“You couldn’t do the math”, said Ambassador Perry Holloway in his interview with reporters published in Stabroek News last Tuesday December 9, 2018 as he exhorted us Guyanese to educate ourselves about the fortune coming our way from ExxonMobil’s oil. Let us allow the man the slack to exult that it was under his watch that a giant American company discovered some of the largest oil finds in the past ten years; that the 2016 Petroleum Agreement signed by the APNU+ AFC gave to the Americans in Guyana’s Maritime Zone an even better version of China’s Belt and Road Plan without even one Dollar or Yuan given by the US Government in loan or grant to the people of Guyana.
But we need to draw the line when exultation turns to condescension and Guyanese are told they cannot count, or as the departed Ambassador said, “do the math.” Well, I have news for the Ambassador: it is he who cannot count and who appears to be uninformed about the terms of the 2016 Agreement.
It is more than a joke that English was too hard and so the Americans created American “English”. Now it seems their math is poor as well, even as their Ambassador criticises us. But we should not be too hard on the poor man as he is no different from the rest of his countrymen and women: America is not among the top twenty-five countries in the world in math and science.