Notwithstanding an all-out price war this week between Saudi Arabia and Russia that can see oil prices fall persistently below Guyana’s production cost, it is fast approaching five years since our eternal dream of lifting ourselves out of what the Jamaican Economist George Beckford termed ‘Persistent Poverty’ reached the crest of not just a mere wave but a tsunami.
However, the merciless price war should sound a cautionary note for economic planners and politicians. The oil price can fall as low as the mid-US$20s per barrel of oil when our cost of production is reputed to be around US$30 to US$35 per barrel. Moreover, both Russia and Saudi Arabia are preparing for the long haul with the former saying it could withstand low oil prices for six to ten years. With its first million barrels of oil already sold and more on the way, it’s a rough welcome to the global oil market for Guyana and a veritable glut now exists.
Nevertheless, it is pointless to seek to rationalize the timing of the ‘arrival’ of oil, far less intellectually taxing to settle for reminding ourselves that these things are not in our hands.
Of infinitely greater relevance is the fact that our oil discovery has altered the national psyche in a manner that nothing else in our history has ever done. Dreams which, hitherto, had been wild and fanciful became altogether attainable. What had been ‘hopes and aspirations’ became altogether reasonable expectations, attainable goals. Popular discourse, these days, spews exalted but altogether realistic ambitions across the broadest spectrum of our society. These, mind you, would, hitherto, have been dismissed as the kinds of ‘pipe dreams’ that, ever so often, derive from the familiar grandiose delusions of long-impoverished people.
The national chatter about oil and its likely transformational effect has become intense, though, frankly, it has ranged from the seemingly enlightened but all too often ill-informed to the downright fanciful, rising up to absurd heights, fashioning inside our heads the mythical El Dorado that has eluded successive generations but which every succeeding generation might have.
The dreams that have flourished since 2015 have been good for the national psyche. We have embraced them passionately for the reason that they have brought with them a generous measure of distraction from what has been an unending journey of disenchantment and depression that derives from drifting in and out of emotional peaks and troughs and eventually, into that state of utter exhaustion that derives from the unchanging inevitability of sustained impoverishment and its unpalatable consequences.
It is, for the most part, the reality that in global terms, our development has been limited largely to dreaming dreams, that had caused us to erupt into a condition of wild excitement, much of the national discourse on just where our ‘oil wealth’ can take us revolving around magnificent material transformations – unending miles of table-topped highways, state-of-the-art health facilities, a second-to-none education system, a housing sector that has left slums behind and levels of material means that render us strangers to any kind of deprivation. It was too, the notion that every impoverished soul had developed that at an individual level his/her material circumstances would almost certainly be radically transformed. These alluring spinoffs from our new-founded oil wealth have, these past five years, transfixed the nation, paraded themselves before us in a manner that has been lifting though, perhaps not either as reflective or as sobering as we might have hoped. Those expectations can easily be deflated this year if our oil enterprise runs at a loss considering the collapse in prices.
Here, the question arises as to whether, perhaps, we have not become so blinded by our good fortune that we are unmindful of the reality that unless we prepare ourselves for the future that now beckons, it can, in one fell swoop, collapse into a condition that can be far worse in its longer-term impact than the one that preceded it. Failure to read the ‘tea leaves’ can spell ruin for the nation.
Our oil discovery, as much as it has brought a huge sense of rising expectations, has, at least up until now, done little to raise our awareness of the way we live as a nation. At this very moment we are reminded not just that the mood of national optimism that erupted in May 2015 still persists but that, for all of its positive portents, it finds itself confronted with a dangerous adversary in our dysfunctional social relations and that it is, as much our collective will as a people as the prospects held by our ‘oil wealth’ that will determine just where we go from here.
That, worryingly, is a lesson that we may learn the hardest possible way except we change our dangerous course now and assess other jeopardies such as the slumping oil prices.
