Back in 2015, it had taken little or no time after ExxonMobil’s first oil disclosure for public reactions to materialise. A surge of national euphoria had been followed by boisterous recommendations on just how the returns from the country’s anticipated oil sales should be disbursed.
The chatter centred mostly around the desirability of spending on the needs of the poor. A great many of us resurrected the stories that we had been told half a century earlier about the Middle East including the miraculous trans-formation of poor communities.
Making fair promises comes easily to those who are aware that they are not necessarily bound by their commitments; that they enjoy the luxury of simply being eager to please at a particular point in time. Recall too that the first oil disclosure had coincided roughly with the election of a new government to office. For a while it enjoyed the luxury of being able to ‘walk on water’. For a while, anything went.
Much of the national expectation appeared to centre around the notion that such oil-driven transformation as would materialise would enjoy a more-or-less short-term appearance, which is why, one feels, the idea of a one-off, lump-sum monetary allocation to every household secured so much national traction. For the poor and the not so well off it was simply a matter of the situation warranting some degree of instant gratification, some measure that would at least fill the gap between the earliest official promises and those longer-term offerings that would take time.
The idea of an instant gratification handout never seemed to secure much traction at the level of government. In its place came undertakings that longer-term benefits would be forthcoming and that we would not have to wait for an interminable period before those were realised. Amongst the poor and the powerless that perspective never really appeared to catch on. Instant gratification was, however, never on the table.
The COVID-19 emergency intervened to set aside the instant gratification discourse. There was to be no immediate largesse. The subsequent September 2020 $25,000.00 ‘COVID-19 grant’ was the closest that we would come.
If the grant fell short of what might have been advocated, indeed, expected, there was no surfeit of protest. The grant appeared to have been accepted with the kind of forbearance that has become characteristic of the national disposition, the only complaints being about the logistical anomalies that attended the distribution exercise.
It took a while and a great deal of national bellyaching before we got the message that there would be no significant instant gratification. We would have to wait on the politics and the palavering.
It was only a matter of time before the din of the instant gratification clamour would die down, stifled by a belated realisation that the acquisition of oil wealth went way beyond the ExxonMobil announce-ment that oil had been found.
If, however, the nation would eventually settle for the reality that there was nothing in the oil ‘miracle’ about a quick fix, other issues were thrust onto the agenda. There were the loudly trumpeted concerns that underpinned the grumblings about the fiduciary bona fides of the keepers of the public purse, the politicians serving up the kinds of promises which, more often than not, they for one reason or another, find hard to keep.
Whether those who rule could ever be wholly trusted with the public purse is a question that will keep on being debated in Guyana. Where public accountability is concerned there has simply been far too much unfortunate precedent.
At one point during the public discourse on just how the accumulated oil earnings would be safeguarded, ‘the Kazakhstan option’ came up. One felt that option had been given short public shrift if for no other reason than the fact that we knew too little about Kazakhstan to determine whether it was safe to emulate, lock, stock and barrel, that country’s chosen way of securing its oil money.
The new reality of Guyana’s status as an oil-producing country have placed other wider responsibilities on our plate; like the reality of being part of an emerging South American oil conglomerate. Here, there are implications for our commitment to the protection of the environment, including the nexus between being an oil-producing country and developing a more acute awareness of the link between fossil fuels and climate change. In this regard we are going to have to undertake an expansion of our foreign policy agenda beyond what it has been for more than half a century, to take far greater account of environmental issues. Further, we are going to have to contemplate our status as an oil-producing country against the backdrop of what this means for national security, particularly for our relationships with our immediate neighbours and the hemisphere as a whole.
With regard to our relations with our neighbours, the complete picture is still to arrive at a sufficient level of clarity. The issue of the seemingly imminent final legal settlement of Venezuela’s territorial claim is by far the most important issue here since the inviolability or otherwise of our territorial space will determine, to a large extent, our success or otherwise as an oil-producing nation.
Nothing, of course, will appear more crass or more comical, than an oil-credentialled country that demonstrates a patent inability to prevent its urban municipal headquarters from disintegrating into an eyesore. That is where we are at this time.
A programme of national infrastructural trans-formation commensurate with our status as a hemispheric oil power is going to have to be included in whatever else we contemplate and if it becomes necessary to get outside help to protect the investments that will have to be made, then so be it.
Truth be told, the likelihood that the big spending that will eventually attend oil-funded projects may well attract corruption on what is commonly referred to as a grand scale, cannot be ruled out. But then we can always opt to bury our heads in the sand and try to wish that reality away.
