The earliest public disclosure on Guyana’s first confirmed oil ‘strike’ by ExxonMobil back in 2015, was, without question, one of the most significant pieces of public information to be disseminated to Guyanese in the country’s history. One makes this argument having regard to the impact which the disclosure has had, not just on our perception as a people insofar as our oil and gas ‘find’, but to set to one side the historic ‘banana republic’ perception with which we had been ‘sold’ about ourselves.
It also afforded us a significantly higher level of positive external reportage about Guyana that went well beyond the familiar of ethnic differences and dubious democratic credentials. Going further, it would be more than fair to say that our earliest ‘oil find’ created decidedly premature and exalted expectations regarding just what was in store for us arising out of our ‘oil find.’
The expectations of much of the populace were fashioned based on what our ‘readings’ had told us, the dramatic socio-economic transformations that ‘oil finds’ had on contributing to socio-economic transformations in neighbouring Venezuela, in fellow CARICOM member country, Trinidad and Tobago, and certainly in the Middle East, where hitherto impoverished ‘desert kingdoms’ had used their petro fortunes to draw attention to themselves in ways which, at one point were seen – to a considerable extent by the rest of the world – as more than a trifle outlandish. Oil prospects notwithstanding, Guyana’s approach has always been to ‘strategically’ hold out the somewhat distant promise which oil appeared to proffer, whilst pressing the country’s agriculture sector, primarily, into service as a means through which to ‘hedge its bets.’
If it can be argued that looking to the land had served as a sort of economic ‘holding position,’ neither government nor the wider populace had ever appeared to be of the view that agriculture would be the route out of poverty, though it has to be said that whilst agriculture was never likely (at least in the short to medium term) to bring about any radical national standard of living transformation, it has served over the years as a more than useful ‘holding position’ at least in terms of its contribution where the country’s food security was concerned. Whether oil will be all that it had hitherto been held out to be, and much of that is debatable, it has come with its hopes, its ambitions and even with its fair share of aspirations.
To those, of course, can be added, its openings for mismanagement and corruption.
From what had been, previously, in the eyes of large swathes of the international community, a so-called ‘banana republic’, (an expression that must surely have given offense to not a few), but perhaps more to the point for a hitherto poverty-stricken nation, oil has played a kind of instant emotional gratification role for a country that had appeared to have given up the pursuit of escape from the poverty trap. Oil, for Guyana, had the effect of a ‘feel good,’ instant gratification, never mind the fact that, unsurprisingly, the pace it has transform the circumstances of a country that has lived cheek-by-jowl with persistent poverty for all of its history as an independent nation. Contextually, the coincidence between the ‘good fortune’ of our oil finds and the significant rise in the decibel level of the climate change conversation is almost certain to be seen by both government and the populace as a ‘spoiler.’
However this might sound, it is almost certain that here in Guyana, the issue of climate change is likely to be regarded as a ‘party pooper’ which is why our climate change ‘crowd’ would appear to have secured very little ‘traction’ with an audience which, at least up to this time, appears to have (for the most part) cultivated a one track mind on what one dance can do. We may as well be frank about it. If climate change is to make any real head way in pushing back the fossil fuel ‘one track mind’ that prevails in Guyana it will have to (as we say in Guyana), come good. It will have to fight its way past what has long developed into a formidable oil and gas euphoria that has put on the table ‘credentials’ that have to do with championing the country’s fight against poverty. Insofar as countries like Guyana are concerned (up until now, at least) the manifestations of climate change are yet to arrive at a point where it is causing us to cringe in terror.
