So far have we travelled from the condition of national euphoria that attended the May 2015 announcement by ExxonMobil that the Liza-1 oil well in the Stabroek block had yielded the first ‘world class’ oil find offshore Guyana, that last Tuesday’s revelation by the same company that it had had made the country’s nineteenth major oil find barely provoked a murmur from the country as a whole.
Guyanese are not likely to ‘go there’ again without decidedly compelling reason.
Just the day before the Uaru-2 discovery disclosure, the mainstream media and the various other interested parties were far too preoccupied with the happenings in courts arising out of the APNU+AFC’s elections petition to bother much. It is as if the repetitive nature of ‘light, sweet’ crude finds had robbed the announcements of any sort of national traction. Indeed, a juxtaposition of the two sets of circumstances, the pronouncement by ExxonMobil on the further extension of Guyana’s proven significant oil wealth, on the one hand and the political crack into which we appear to have slipped since the May 2015 first oil find, on the other, lays bare an important lesson. Oil or no oil, the country’s hoped-for development trajectory is not something that can be taken for granted. We are on a hiding to nowhere unless we get our act together and that, on the basis of the available evidence, will take some doing.
The various pronouncements, predictions and projections that have attended the countless analyses of our hoped-for oil-driven development trajectory, taking account of the earnings that are projected to accrue to the economy, almost always, for some inexplicable reason, neglect to factor in the examples that abound elsewhere of resource curse ambushes that have snuffed out dreams. The examples are far too numerous, too repetitive, for us not to pay heed. For one thing, there is now the indisputable reality of us being seemingly unable to jettison the extant unchanging political climate that continues to shape our governance arrangements. That stands as, arguably, the biggest challenge to the dreams and aspirations mouthed with monotonous regularity by those who rule. It has long been a matter of things remaining the same, the more they change.
In the immediate aftermath of the Liza-1 first find, we had been (and understandably so) too preoccupied with a huge exhalation process to recognise that our oil discovery had meant that we had entered uncharted waters. What followed after the euphoria had subsided was that we were assailed by a groundswell of conflicting opinion on ‘the way forward’, the discourse often spilling over into public controversy amongst our ready-made oil and gas experts. It took time to expose the barrenness of our knowledge base. Mind you, insofar as public enlightenment was concerned, what was ensuing in terms of national ‘discourse’ was offering as much heat as it was, light.
Nor can it be overlooked that, quickly, the euphoria that had attended the May 2015 oil find and the attendant articulation of pipe dreams was harshly disrupted by the political distractions occasioned, first, by the ‘no confidence’ vote in the National Assembly and afterwards by the compelling distractions of the brouhaha that followed the March 2020 poll.
Little happened to distract ExxonMobil, with its distant offshore operations from ‘getting on with it’ as far as oil recovery was concerned. Indeed, upon reflection, it almost defies belief that just over five years after we were first told that there was crude in our territorial waters in commercial quantities we have already begun to draw down on payments accruing from the earliest lifts.
There have been other changes too. The external fortune seekers appear not to have been put off one bit by the political uncertainties that obtained for more than a year and now by the significant onshore vicissitudes of the COVID-19 pandemic. They have come in their numbers and have been busying themselves preparing to lay foundations for their expected wealth that will derive from what they anticipate will be a powerhouse Guyana economy; and they are prepared to wait.
There have been changes in the posture of the business class here too. The private sector appears to have set out its stall to reap such benefits that will accrue from the Local Content offerings. If anything, however, that section of the populace that whooped and cheered in 2015 is still awaiting a repeat dose of euphoria. On the whole, we have settled back into a kind of ‘slow march’ circumstance attended by a drumbeat that offers no definitive clue as to what is really in store… down the road.
For the Guyana business class there are the Local Content prospects that will probably prove sufficient to satisfy their ambitions. The fate of the population as a whole appears undetermined up to this time, changes in their material circumstances being dependent, mostly, on the judgements of those who rule and on whether or not they provide what they promise.
Up until now, oil has been about promises that hinge on the dispositions – to say nothing about the wisdom and acumen – of those who lead us. The problem is that the available evidence offers us perilously little clue as to where we are likely to end up. Who can deny that there is a great gulf between what we know and where we aspire to go and what we want to achieve, and there is always the possibility that this gulf may come to be filled by those who harbour our own ambitions.
The point that should be made here – and it cannot be made too strongly – is that the noises to which the hopes and aspirations amount cannot, not even remotely, be hinged to the realisation of hopes and dreams. There is oil there and there is optimism and hopes and dreams too, but history still cautions us that we may be going forward on a proverbial wing and a prayer.
