To say that 2022 was an eventful year for Guyana is to indulge in considerable understatement. The year found us in the process of continuing to shed our long-assigned label as the ‘sick man’ of the Caribbean. This, as the reality of our status as an oil-producing country continued to transform the country into a lightning rod for regional and international attention in a manner which, for a change, was more pleasing, less demeaning.
Year 2015 and the years since, have helped to tutor us in the challenges that go with change. We have been witness to what one might call the process of our global repositioning. If the condescending international reportage about the calumnies of our socio political condition have not disappeared altogether, they have, at least, diminished considerably. Reportage on the various socio-political dimensions of our ‘banana republic’ condition are being replaced by excitable accounts of what is now seen as our swift and dramatically altered contemporary condition as an oil-producing country.
In large measure, we still seek to understand the phenomenon of our global re-positioning. It has been sudden, not easy to fully comprehend. There is every chance, too, that it might be altogether misleading.
In real terms, up until now, oil has not really altered a great deal. What it has done, however, is to open up a field of dreams that transports us past what, for generations, had been a settled condition of underdevelopment to which we appeared to have resigned ourselves and the degrading downside that went with it. 2022, it seemed, was part of an ongoing experience of shedding that skin.
We have, one hopes, continued to begin to see ourselves differently; to come to grips with the phenomenon of our global and regional re-positioning. These days, for a change, we have at least been able to cause much of the international media to alter its Guyana ‘script’ somewhat, to dwell much more pointedly on matters of promise and potential. Such adjustments are important insofar as they may help us to begin to see ourselves differently and perhaps even to finally cause us to exorcise the bogey of the Banana Republic…never mind the fact that old habits die hard, old blemishes can sometimes leave indelible scars, and that we are now altogether exposed to the malady of the Dutch Disease.
Hopefully, part of our contemplation of our ‘oil fortune’ will teach us that change will have its challenges. One of those is the challenge of beginning to see ourselves differently, to act out the part of a nation in transformation. In the process we will, doubtless, discover that putting behind us some of the ‘old habits’ that have retarded us as a nation may not always be as easy as we might have imagined. For this reason we are going to have to learn to place restrictions on what, frequently, can be a proclivity for thinking too far ahead, too quickly.
By the end of 2022, much of the region had become wedged in a discomfiting space, socio- economic challenges extending, in quite a few instances, into the realms of food insecurity and poignant reminders of the Caribbean’s climate change-related vulnerability. Guyana, by contrast, cut a decidedly more ‘presentable’ figure. Our condition as an oil-producer allowed us to present ourselves, more than previously, as ready to accept the mantle of regional leadership.
In the year that is now behind us we hit the regional stage in a condition of infinitely greater confidence. And why not? Our accustomed sackcloth and ashes socio-economic image had, by last year, become considerably burnished by the reality of the incremental promise deriving from the country’s oil resources and the role that these resources can play in helping to transform the Caribbean, as a whole. We only have to count the number of CARICOM Heads (and other high-level delegations) that found their respective ways here during 2022 to appreciate the extent to which Guyana has become, arguably, the most looked-to member of the Community.
At home, change had begun to materialise mostly in the boisterous official pronouncements both at home and globally regarding what our oil ‘bonanza’ could eventually mean in futuristic transformational terms. Some measure of transformation had already begun to occur, manifesting itself in what appeared to be a radically altered international perception of the prospects for the one-time ‘banana republic.’ Guyana was being trumpeted as being on the ‘up and up’, bursting with accessible opportunities for meaningful social and economic transformation that could impact the world beyond our shores.
If the relative handful of petro dollars that the country has already begun to earn and to spend are yet to leave any notable transformational footprint, the global attention which the country now enjoys mostly through widely publicized estimates of its remaining oil assets and the comings and goings, with monotonous regularity, of potential investors and international oil and gas ‘high fliers,’ has had the effect of helping remove the demeaning lenses through which the country has long been seen. In the business sector, news of oil has created marked attitudinal change. Our extant and would-be entrepreneurs began to busy themselves learning the ways of global entrepreneurship, wary of the danger that the moment might pass them by. Simultaneously, we have become accustomed to entertaining a different ‘level’ of visitors, politicians, oil executives, business moguls and sundry fortune-seekers who have ‘seen the light’ and are following it.
Our politicians and what, up until then, had been our largely vapid private sector, ‘sell’ the opportunities that inhere in our oil promise as best they could.
It is the change in the national mood that has been most pointed. Historical precedent has tutored Guyanese well in the dangers that inhere in getting ahead of themselves. There is, however, a sense that the worm is beginning to turn. That sense derives in great measure from our awareness of the altered global perceptions of Guyana. The world is viewing us through somewhat altered lenses these days.
Political behaviour has changed too. Our oil and gas ‘treasure trove’ has seemingly allowed for a greater ‘fastness’ and ‘looseness’ in the making of political promises and the dispensing of occasional eye-catching across-the-board palliatives. If government understands only too well that one swallow is unlikely to second guess the weather man it understands that it must deploy such measures as lie within its power to present the oil and gas transformation to a nation chomping at the bit for change. If there may still be a clamour for more, much more, it appears to have been decided that incremental material gestures will be deployed as an instrument of social control. While, however, those gestures have served to help create a somewhat more upbeat national mood, those who rule presumably understand that what has now become a surfeit of exalted national expectations are now unlikely to be easily reined in. The biggest risk here may repose in allowing the creation of a condition in which what derives from our oil and gas bonanza gives rise to an unevenness in the distribution of gains that is sufficient to create a condition in which far too many of us find ourselves searching futilely for the change. Such a circumstance will have its own profound implications.
