The successive oil and gas fora that have been staged in Guyana have had the effect of attracting a level of international attention to the country that complements the high global profile which the country had incrementally accumulated in the wake of ExxonMobil’s 2015 announcement of its first major oil find offshore Guyana.
Nothing else in our history has brought the country that level of media-driven international attention since the Jonestown occurrence 44 years earlier.
Before oil, the favoured lenses through which the international community continued to see Guyana had to do, mostly, with themes like impoverishment, and ethnic division and rigged elections and while those themes remain extant in some international assessments of ‘the only English-speaking country on the South American continent’, (frankly, a tiresome, worn-out cliché) they are no longer the pre-eminent considerations shaping international perceptions of Guyana. In the minds of global audiences Guyana is, at least for now, ‘on hold’ in a kind of ‘waiting area’ until a determination is eventually made with regard to just how its ‘oil wealth’ fits into a wider global matrix.
Some of the portents are already beginning to become clearer. Guyana and her ‘oil wealth’ are, increasingly, being fitted into a wider global fossil fuel energy matrix that will, in time, alter international perceptions of who we are. There is talk of us becoming the next ‘global economic miracle,’ (evidently a somewhat far-fetched notion at this juncture) perhaps something akin to the now oil-driven transformed economies and societies of the Middle East. That perception, however, it has to be said, is tempered by imponderables that include whether or not we can create a suitable governance structure to cause us to optimize the real returns from our oil dreams. That, going forward, may well prove to be our most formidable challenge.
There are signs that we are already aware of the fact that our vaunted oil and gas resources could make us or be something far less. It didn’t take long after ExxonMobil had announced its first oil find 2015, for a national clamour to erupt amidst an understandable sea of exalted expectations, some of them controversial, others wildly unrealistic. Here, one might argue that coming from where we had been, mentally, that is, a rush of what, in some instances, were altogether delusional expectations, was not an unsurprising response to the hype that had derived from the news that ExxonMobil had brought us.
After the 2015 oil find news had quickly made its way into the political realm, ‘who governs’ and the manner in which we are governed became matters of significantly exalted significance. While our 2015 initial major oil find may have gifted us a sharp infusion of ‘feel good’ sensations, it can hardly be denied that it also delivered bogeys that had to do with matters like ‘who rules’ and how the occupancy of political office might impact on the manner in which our oil ‘spoils’ were to be divided.
Rapidly rising expectations, in Guyana’s particular circumstances, would have been difficult if not impossible to restrain, anyway, though the issue of who gets what becomes more than a little worrisome when that discourse is grafted onto already pre-existing political divisions. The reality is (whether we like it or not) that the advent of oil had placed new, more challenging political items on the national agenda. These may not have been trumpeted across the reportage of the media houses though they would certainly have arisen on the agenda of the political protagonists. The reality is that gatherings like our recently concluded and reported-on international Oil and Gas Forum continue to place Guyana’s ‘oil, wealth’ in a context that appears concerned mostly with who gets what from our oil and gas yield as well as just how our reserves impact the wider global oil and gas supply dynamic. We in Guyana, meanwhile, having dreamt our ‘El Dorado’ dreams from time immemorial, perceive the advent of oil as a matter of prayers having been answered and historic dreams having come true. The problem here, of course, is that we are quickly coming to an understanding that the world doesn’t quite work that way.
Oil for us, will amount to a trickle down, a somewhat generous one, but a trickle down, nonetheless, much more significant enrichments accruing to smaller cliques, investors whose technology and investment ‘risk’ now place them firmly in the driver’s seat.
On the one hand, for Guyana, it is a matter of prayers having finally been answered. On the other, it is a matter of us doing what we can to ensure that, given much of the political narrative that has been superimposed on the oil and gas discourse, our oil and gas resources do not result in the anticipated ‘returns’ turning out to be something of a poisoned chalice.
There are two distinct dimensions to Guyana’s oil and gas dynamic. The first has to do with the relevance of the resource to the wider global context in which we perceive the commodity. As of 2015 when ExxonMobil confirmed that our territorial waters were the jurisdiction for significant volumes of oil and gas, global perceptions of Guyana changed, not on account of some meaningful socio-political transformation but because the physical jurisdiction of the country held deposits of a commodity of significant global importance. Here in Guyana altered perceptions of ourselves resulting from our oil finds ran much deeper. It had the effect, first, of making a case for revisiting the ‘Banana Republic’ label with which we, historically, have been tagged. What it also did was to cause us to take a fresh look at ourselves and to seek to determine if/whether the overarching opportunities that derive from our new-found ‘oil wealth’ could fashion a ‘weapon’ with which to slay the ghost of historic ethno/political divisions that still have the potential to set back our oil dreams.
Who knows whether this might not be the most challenging hurdle for us to get across in the period ahead.