Dear Editor,
Anti-Climax or what? No struggle down the back roads of Water Street to fight for a parking space (wot no meters yet?), smile at the polis and enter the parallel universe of the Energy Conference. That circus has come to town and gone back to the four corners of the oil world. What emerged? Guyana has oil. Plenty of it. Guyana will have prosperity. Plenty of it. Soon. So what?
Bill is looking for the national conversation on Guyana’s oil and gas future. It ain’t there. Not promoted by the big boys, the media, and civil society in the posher parts of Georgetown. Freddie is right. Once more. They (the one person NGOs) only speak out on largely irrelevant issues, not the big ones. Attack dogs with muted middle class barks. Instead he had a mini town hall at his book launch (Oil Dorado? Guyana’s Black Gold on sale at Austin’s the Guyana bookstore as you ask). Present, small but perfectly formed cross section of Guysociety simply gaffing. What floated their boats? Distribution of wealth and security top of the list. The idea of trickle down and greater wealth for is all very attractive but how was it to be achieved? How much of the oil wealth would stick to fingers on the way through? How were the Guyanese to ensure it was not ‘teefed’ as we say? Did the watchdogs charged with guarding the public interest have enough bite? Or indeed any at all?
A major fear was that traditional ‘Guyanese’ values like hard work and respect for others, already degraded, would be degraded even more by sudden prosperity. Roads are a metaphor for the chaos that is Guyana. Wild West does not start to describe it. Devil take the hindmost especially on the highways. Bill remembers when he was a little boy-ok a long time ago-and wall of death raiders came-from America? – To perform at the sea wall. Implanted on my young brain. The east bank highway is the modern equivalent of the Wall of Death. Cars are weapons. Some people drive them loaded. Where are the cops? Where is decent behaviour on the highways of the land? Answers on a memorial card please. Still on safety, perceptions of a crime wave fed by endless reports in this and other organs. ’Man chops wife’, ’Man chops another in drunken rum shop brawl’ and so on. Does that deter the diaspora from coming back ‘home’? Will it get worse? Is the future of Guyliving the gated communities that are springing up all over the east coast and east bank? Is that future life as we are to understand it? Many big questions came out of Bill’s mini town hall. When will big or even little answers come out of the ground with the oil? Watch this space. Or not. Pip! Pip! (as we used to say)
Sincerely,
John ‘Bill Cotton/Reform’ Mair
