If it is a well-known fact that race-based politics attended by election-time tensions have historically been par for the course on Guyana’s political landscape, regional and national elections here have never, hitherto, attracted much more than passing attention from the international community. Not so this time around where a few notable news sites, some better known for their preoccupation with oil & gas issues, had, even before last Monday, been having their say on the poll, the outcome of which will determine which of the two major political forces: the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) and the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) will govern the country for at least the next five years.
The aforementioned titles of the two major parties are, for the purpose of general elections, misleading. Both of them, for electioneering purposes, have long subsumed their original titles beneath coalition arrangements for the purpose of extending their political reach beyond the traditional ethnic lines. The PNCR, for general elections purposes, is known as A Partnership for National Unity+Alliance For Change while the PPP now goes to the polls under the name, People’s Progressive Party/Civic. An examination of the pattern of voting at this week’s general elections provides, perhaps, the best answer to whether or not, for either party, this has been a successful strategy.
Those, however, are domestic political considerations that are of minimal interest to the international community. The concern of our foreign watchers has to do with how the outcome of Monday’s poll impacts the stability of a country which, overnight, has become a not insignificant player in the international oil & gas community. In less than five years Guyana has risen from being a country that had always been believed to have significant but unproven reserves of oil to the status of an oil exporter with reserves which, by international estimates, would make it, among OPEC member countries, the 12th largest oil producer.
The now historic no-confidence motion in the National Assembly by the PPP/C that eventually pushed the APNU+AFC administration to holding these elections (routine general elections would have been due in a couple of months anyway) was felt by many political analysts to have been underpinned by a mindfulness of the country’s new-found oil wealth and the fact that the winners of Monday’s poll would have positioned themselves to take control of the returns expected to accrue to the country in the short term and thereby enhance their chances of consolidating their longer term occupancy of office by being able to take credit for what could be the comparatively significant developments that could occur here over the next five years.
For the international community its interest reposes, in the main, in how reliable Guyana will prove to be in the longer term as a not insignificant global supplier of what, arguably, is still the world’s most important natural resource, oil. That is why external media houses, not substantively concerned with the domestic wrangling of poor, underdeveloped countries, have been paying more attention than usual to this week’s general elections.
ExxonMobil’s disclosure in May 2015 of commercial quantities of oil in the Liza-1 well of its Stabroek Block and the subsequent oil discoveries, have triggered a surfeit of chatter in the media here, much of it critical of APNU+AFC’s handling of contractual arrangements associated with maximising the country’s return from the resource. Much of the chatter, though, has seemingly been characterised by deeper political undertones and some informed analysts are likely to go as far as suggesting that Monday’s General Elections were essentially about political control of the country’s oil & gas reserves.
Ordinary Guyanese, while having a great deal to say in public about the likely transformational fortune-implications of oil wealth and how this could change their lives, have, on account of their understandable lack of knowledge of the sector, been unable to venture too deeply into the public discourse on the intricacies of the machinations that attend contractual undertakings. They have, however, had a great deal to say on the matter of whether, whoever governs, the benefits of the country’s earnings from oil and gas will reach down to lifting ordinary people out of poverty and raising living standards in the country as a whole or whether Guyana may follow the lead of other poor countries whose fortunes could have been transformed by oil had they not opted to go down the road of corruption and profligate spending.
In passing (and what, perhaps, may be less apparent to the external analysts) is that what we saw of voting patterns at Monday’s poll was essentially a repetition of ethnic cleavage which, oil or no oil, is probably likely to continue to impede social cohesion and, by extension, real national development. In the longer term, too, it is likely to impact on stability in a manner that could render virtually meaningless the country’s good fortune of its oil wealth.
