Introduction
This column extends to Mr Trotman compliments and appreciation for his publication. It is not a major work and the ten chapters of the book cover just 50 pages. But he does have the distinction of being the Minister under whom Guyana became an oil producing state, and his version of the events leading up to that occasion in 2019, is a matter for current political discourse as well as the historical records.
Prior to the election of the current President, our country has had eight presidents and it is most unfortunate that none of them has had a biography or an autobiography, encompassing their presidency. The same holds true for our past Finance Ministers and Foreign Ministers who have served through some momentous episodes in the country’s brief history. It would be edifying and instructive to have read the personal reflections of Burnham to Ramotar and Granger, from Frank Hope to Winston Jordan, and from Demond Hoyte to Moses Nagamootoo. Their contributions might have saved us from that national pastime of repeating the mistakes of the past.
At a broader level, if among our leaders we do not have the culture of writing, how do we encourage reading among the ordinary people?
Indeed, I take this opportunity to give a shout-out to former Ambassador Cedric Joseph, whose tome Anglo-American Diplomacy and the Reopening of the Guyana – Venezuela Boundary Controversy 1961- 1966 is a masterful work, relevant to our response to the wild threat from Venezuela. I would be pleasantly surprised if 10% of our leaders and MP’s have read that excellent 500-plus page book.
The burden
Trotman made it clear in the book that he was becoming tired “of carrying the burden of the agreement alone and wanted to speak out some more.” Apart from the interesting choice of language, in From Destiny to Prosperity, Trotman does more than speak out. He has shifted responsibility for the signing of the petroleum agreement to various persons including President Granger and Minister Greenidge; attributed responsibility for the contents of the 2016 Agreement to the GGMC, as well as seeking legal advice from that body. He does not stop there: for the tax concessions, he not only sought to share the blame with the opposition but suggests that Mr. Bharrat Jagdeo, Opposition Leader, somehow agreed to be silent on the tax concessions. As a result, the book has effectively neutralised and silenced any criticism from the PPP/C about the APNU+AFCs generous tax concessions.
Trotman puts a lot of store in honesty and integrity. In fact, the very first words in the book were a quote from the book of the prophet Zachariah “That you should speak the truth to one another…” It does not seem, however, that he held faithfully to the admonition of the prophet. For example, his praise of Minister Broomes and his suggestion that he and Broomes “never got an opportunity to gel”, appears to be in conflict with his having a hand in her being removed from his ministry.
Ignoring Clyde
To me, however, the greatest avoidance of the truth is the complete omission of any acknowledgement or reference to the Clyde & Co. report, which he commissioned, and which reveals that the Paper he took to Cabinet, seeking its approval of the 2016 agreement was written by an Exxon official and vice president Mr. Brooke Harris, who was one of the persons who bullied the GGMC technical team when it visited Texas.
If the PPP/C truly wanted to see how the 2016 Agreement came about, or wanted to embarrass the members of the Opposition, then the Clyde and Co report is the way to do it.
Trotman states in the book that he had difficulty finding a template for a production licence. If that is indeed the case, then he clearly did not read the very Act and Regulations for which he was assigned ministerial responsibility. Those regulations spell out what an application for a production licence should look like and what the licence itself should contain. Instead, he relied on an unofficial copy “from an African state”.
Forgive the incredulity, but it is hard to believe that Trotman relied on non-lawyers for critical legal advice when he had at his disposal the expertise of Sir Shridath Ramphal and open access to the Attorney-General. Recall that it was Sir Shridath who acted as the guarantor of the Bridging Deed, the instrument used to revive the 1999 Agreement which would have finally expired in 2018. I maintain that that was not legally permissible and what Trotman should have done, if he felt it expedient to give Exxon a new Agreement, is that the government should have gone back to the National Assembly seeking a derogation from the requirement which allows only a single Agreement.
Sourced to the book, Column 112 identified what Trotman, with justification, referred to as achievements, of which production in about 4 1/2 years after discovery, and membership of Guyana in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, are standouts. Trotman was clearly slow in moving to have an audit of the pre-contract costs and was badly advised in accepting Exxon’s incorrect total expenditure up to December 2015. But his most egregious failure was his inability to understand the difference in the risks between a pre- and a post discovery Agreement. Trotman ought too, to have moved far more quickly to enforce the local content requirements of the 1986 Regulations, if in fact he did know about them.
Conclusion
To Trotman’s and the Granger’s Administration credit, their proposed independent Petroleum Commission would have been in place and the demonstration of incompetence and recklessness evident in the recent US$214 Mn. claim expense fiasco would have been avoided. It boggles the mind that we have a Forestry Commission, an independent Commission for gold, diamond and mining, a Broadcasting Authority, a Civil Aviation Authority, a Rice Development Board, a Livestock Development Authority and a Tourism Authority, while petroleum, which dwarfs all the other economic subsectors combined, is firmly in the hands of politicians, who seem unfamiliar with the basics of the sector. Not only should we not have been surprised at the fiasco in the Ministry of Natural Resources under weak ministerial leadership and political direction, but we need to lower our expectations.
My rather casual information is that very few of our decision-makers have bothered to learn from the experiences narrated in Trotman’s book. The mistakes during the APNU+AFC’s Administration were made by politicians, not technocrats. We should not be surprised if such incidents and failures recur with great cost to our country while the petroleum sector remains firmly under political control.
