It is now approximately 136 days since the first official public report was issued to the world about a novel coronavirus that was causing debilitating illness and death. From then to now there have been some 4.3 million cases, and close to 300,000 deaths worldwide owing to the disease that has been given the name Covid-19 and declared a pandemic. Given its global spread, Covid-19 is possibly what most people will remember in time to come when 2020 is spoken or written about.
But maybe not in Guyana. When 2020 is cited in the annals of our history, there will be a toss up over which takes precedence, the fiasco that followed this country’s general and regional elections or the Covid-19 pandemic.
As regards the elections, the lengthy counting of votes and delayed elections results were forever both a cause of worry and a public joke. But no one could have foreseen this year’s record, 75 days and counting, literally counting, as the ballots are now in the process of being very slowly recounted. As the timeline to the formal declaration of results gains unwanted elasticity, it seems, unnervingly, that there is a master puppeteer directing this descent into further disaster.
Whatever happens going forward, citizens must strive to ensure that we never find ourselves in this position again. Thought must be given, even now, to changing the way our elections are conducted. Demands must be made, and lobbies conducted to ensure that this is done as soon as possible after the last vote is recounted. We need to remember that it is the government that serves the people, not the other way around and something as important as this ought not to be left in the hands of politicians, who, for the most part, only serve themselves.
And while our attention is fully engaged with either safeguarding the validity of the recount process, or ensuring we stay afloat amid the loss of economic stability wrought by the enforced stagnation of business owing to the pandemic, we dare not look ahead. If we did, we would see starkly that the future of our economy’s touted saviour oil, is very bleak indeed.
Covid-19 has effectively put paid to the platitude ‘oil is king’. It took just weeks of the pandemic for oil to move from its lofty US$60-odd per barrel at the end of 2019 to between US$11 and US$25 per barrel at present, lower than the cost of production in some places. The measures necessary to curb the spread of the coronavirus means there is no demand for the by-products of crude oil, like gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Furthermore, because there was not a simultaneous shut down in oil production, supply has exceeded demand to the point that storage is at full capacity in some places. Even if the world reopened fully tomorrow, and that is not likely to happen for some time yet, it would take quite a while to exhaust the supply glut. In addition, one must take into consideration the fact that post-pandemic, more countries will be exploring green approaches to energy. Oil may never be king again.
To put it simply, the so-called black gold in the Liza, Payara, and other wells in Guyana is no longer the valuable resource it was last year. Already there is talk of smaller oil companies imploding, some could be headed to bankruptcy before much longer. The bigger ones might hold out for a while, but at the same time, even they cannot afford to produce what they are unable to sell.
ExxonMobil, which is leading the offshore production of Guyana’s crude oil, has not yet said definitively what its plans are given the current situation, but it would be foolish for anyone to imagine that it is unaffected by what is happening in the industry worldwide. This is no fairy tale, Guyana is certainly not Cinderella, and Exxon, beneath its oily charm, is just another capitalist organisation with a view to making profits. The rags to riches story of Guyana is headed for the backburner.
Like everywhere else in the world, the country is facing an economic recession. It would be better poised to handle this with a government in place. Rocky politics and economic instability make for an extremely poor cocktail, which is why everyone concerned should be doing all in their power to bring the recount to a quick and accurate culmination. It would be unpatriotic to do otherwise.
