Unsurprisingly, the announcement by the Government of Guyana earlier this week that it had been notified by EXXON Mobil of two new offshore oil discoveries created no discernable ripples here, the details of the release on the new discovery issued by the Ministry of Natural Resources failing to generate anything close to the sense of national excitement that erupted in 2015 when the public disclosure of the first oil find was made.
Since 2015, the country has moved on multi-dimensionally, the initial feeling of national euphoria having been transformed into the country becoming bathed in a regional and international glare that has, in some respects, transformed its image both in the region and beyond,. At home, the reality of oil has added compelling new dimensions to the ongoing national discourse on the country’s future.
In the Caribbean, there has occurred, a profound shift in perceptions of Guyana’s role in the Caribbean Community, from that of ‘the sick man’ of the region to the country now best-positioned to lead the region to the developmental transformation which it now urgently seeks.
There can be no question than that setting aside the transformations that have already occurred here on the back of the country’s oil finds, including those that have to do with the evident surfeit of international interest in Guyana as a country with which to do business, there has, as well, developed a sense that the country will now, given its significant ‘oil wealth,’ assume a leadership role within CARICOM as the region seeks to come to grips with its historical social and economic challenges.
This much is already evident in the decidedly higher regional profile acquired by the Government of Guyana as the lead territory in what has now become a much more urgent push for changing the fortunes of the Caribbean in terms of its global image,
Here in Guyana, oil has brought various types of national responses. These include an understandable surge of national expectation, born of a history of material privation and what one might call the nurturing of the ‘El Dorado dream.’ Another has been the not unexpected emerging of a modest but persistent environmental lobby by advocates who, predictably, have opted to treat the advent of our oil finds as an appropriate moment to raise their climate change ‘game.’
The impact of oil on Guyana’s external image has of course gone way beyond regional perceptions of the country and its role as a member of the Caribbean Community. The country’s foreign policy outlook would have undergone something of a transformation, chiefly on account of the adjusted image of the country within the region and beyond, particularly in the context of the now accepted axiom that Guyana is now one of those countries, globally, with which to ‘do business.’ That perception has become emphatically underscored not just by the comings and goings, with monotonous regularity, of delegations of private and public sector officials from all corners of the globe, seeking to probe what Guyana has to offer, but also by what has been the deliberate effort on the part of the Government of Guyana to seek to spread its wings beyond the traditional span of its foreign policy ambitions. Here, one might add that there is already glaring evidence that the extent of the success realized in the pursuit of fashioning a foreign policy that fits in with Guyana becoming a petro state has been halting, its most profound weaknesses being, up to this time, a lack of evidence of appropriate adjustments to its conventional foreign policy structure.
What little has been accomplished in this area has been realized almost exclusively through the high-profile pursuits of the President at the multi-lateral level. The ‘nuts and bolts’ of a foreign policy that is substantively responsive to what one assumes are our oil-driven foreign policy priorities are yet to manifest themselves clearly. Efforts to build bridges with the oil-rich countries of the Middle East have been the most notable feature of what is still a work in progress. Meanwhile, the country is gradually learning to live with the unaccustomed glare of international attention that derives from what now appears to be a pretty widespread assessment that, here in the region, Guyana is the country to do business with at this time. While, unquestionably, oil appears to have set Guyana’s international profile on a different trajectory, the world is bound to be watching to see where the Guyana story eventually leads.
This brings us to the new dimensions to the domestic agenda that derive from the country’s new-found ‘petro’ status. Those have to do with the longer term socio-economic outcomes that our oil resources realize for the country as a whole. Here, the national agenda would appear to be headed, first, by the critical issue of how to transform our oil wealth into an across-the-board, significant raising of the standard of living, an issue which, unsurprisingly, now positions itself at the very heart of the wider ongoing socio-political discourse in Guyana. Then there is the issue of our ‘oil wealth’ and how this stacks up against the emergence of a significantly stepped up global environmental lobby including the prevailing bona fide climate change concerns that have formed gale force winds in the sails of the climate change lobbyists whose persistent lobby continues to benefit from what is now irrefutable evidence that climate change is not only real but already very much menacingly in evidence.
