COUNTRYMAN: A post-oil dream for Guyana

Oct 09, 2016 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols

Diversions from mind-numbing reality are a fact of life. But how do you escape the inevitability of daily, random chaos and death; the tragedy of unfulfilled expectations stalking and bleeding our land? Hope! That before you hit rock bottom, something will intercept the abysmal fall and push you in the only direction that matters – up. Something like geysers of oil, erupting from the ocean floor, filling hearts with joy, barrels with black gold, and the national treasury with economy-transforming currency. Welcome to post-oil Guyana. Put on your imagination cap, but heed the cautionary words of the grassroots experts and prudent economists who foresee a ‘few’ problems for minnows Guyana facing up to the realities and politics of global oil trade.
The year is 2056, and if I’m still alive I’d be a centenarian. With my children enjoying some geriatric indulgence, and I hopefully still lucid, my double great-grands would gaze up at my wrinkled countenance, maybe in awe and fearful respect (The realization may hit that I once looked like them) and ask what it was like for me as a youngster way back in the 20th century, before oil, brain transplants, human cloning, and holographic teachers; even before e-books and laptop computers – that old! This is how the narrative may shape up.
Back in the early nineteen-seventies a few songs by maverick American soul/R&B singer and songwriter Swamp Dogg, were popular in Guyana.  In a reedy but soulful tenor, he sang about everything he thoughtworthy of social comment – from a drug-addicted Vietnam veteran (Sam Stone) to human artificiality (Synthetic world) to a child’s questions about a lost past. (The world beyond)I loved his songs. And at about the same time, John Lennon’s Imagine was stirring the thoughts and conscience of millions of young people around the world with its egalitarian oneness theme. To say that this kind of lyrical commentary touched and moved me and some of my like-minded friends to at least verbal militancy would be an understatement.
Simultaneously, the hippie culture, Black Power movement, and Jamaican ska/reggae conscious music were helping to shape a sort of global response to the perceived evils of capitalism, warmongering and social injustice. Here in Guyana, newly Republic, and painfully aware of our so-called third world colonialist legacy, my hangout peers and I struggled to find the right ideas and ideals to argue over, fight for (if given the right ‘weapons’) and die for if necessary. Then-current events like the Vietnam and Cold wars, the American Civil Rights movement, West Indies emerging cricket superiority, and a new vision of Caribbean integration called Caricom, shaped our ‘debates’.
So I would tell my little ones about these things; about the Guyana I grew up in, and about the drama and disillusion we ran into as we rounded the turn of the century. Would they believe that at one time in our capital city, pot-holed roads, half-working traffic lights, water rationing, and almost daily electricity blackouts were normal? Could they envisage obscenely corrupt officials, kick-down-the-door bandits, sardine-packed minibuses blasting deafening ‘music’ while careening through the streets, and scores of mentally-unsound vagrants? And in the rest of the country, daily bloodshed and the world’s highest suicide rate – in the early 21st century?‘ No Gramps, it couldn’t be that bad!’‘Oh yes it was.’ Then I’ll blow their minds telling them that the network of highways and bridges linking the capital, Bartica, (Smile Barticans) to most of our hinterland regions, was once nonexistent. Ha! They wouldn’t believe that one.
You see, my great-great grandchildren would be growing up in our version of Swamp Dogg’s The World Beyond.  That’s right. By then our oil boom would have transformed Guyana; certainly the country’s infrastructure, if not its national character, making each Guyanese citizen an individual of self-possession and worth. We would have learnt from the mistakes and misjudgments of oily Trinidad and Tobago, and Venezuela, and from our own sordid economic past. We would be watchfully flexible dealing with big brothers America, China, and possibly some new Mid-Eastern friends. And there would be reinvigorated interest in the socialist self-sufficiency vision some of our former political leaders had so we won’t get too carried away.
Imagine our inexplicable housing problem all but solved, our utilities transformed, state-of-the-art technology in government, private enterprise, and domestic use; in communications, the media, transportation, tourism, and leisure activities. Education and Health truly become top priority, and in Athletics we are challenging Jamaica as the regional powerhouse.  Keep dreaming? Newly-reconfigured lands reclaimed from jungle and swamp become agricultural engines and we finally realize our potential as the breadbasket of the region. Sugar and rice may be in decline but gold, diamonds, timber and a resurgent manganese industry handily supplement oil as a major foreign exchange earner.
With a wealthier, healthier, and better-educated populace, racism and sexism, murder and suicide, corruption and criminality hit an all-time low. Unlike Swamp Dogg’s bleak prognosis of ‘The world beyond’ in post-apocalypse America where a child asks, “What was a tree?” my great-great grand would more likely ask, “What was a pothole, or a blackout?” More importantly, why? And how come we’d built our former capital city alongside the Atlantic Ocean, at the mouth of the Demerara River in an area several feet below sea level? I’d tell her to ask the Dutch and English engineers and builders, but with an enhanced educational background, she’ll probably figure out the geo-politics behind it at that time.
Okay, I’m an inveterate dreamer and, like John Lennon, I’ll probably die one. Some dreams may seem improbable or impractical but I don’t think we should ever stop that psychic, creative, flow. I have a feeling that the architects of China’s great wall, America’s Hoover Dam, Panama’s ocean-bridging canal, Dubai’s 2700-ft skyscraper, and Rwanda’s post-genocide reconstruction, had to have dreamt and conceptualized these achievements before the first plans were drafted and debated. An oil-rich, socially and politically-reformed Guyana is not that much of a stretch. Or is it? (Read M. Maxwell’s recent cautionary letter-to-the-editor {Stabroek News I think} on our oil future and chew on it, but don’t stop dreaming) And remember that I have the vision, not the details.
There are two kinds of ‘boom’ for Guyanese to consider oil-wise. One is the sound of an oil volcano blasting up from underground, echoing from Punta Playa to Dadanawa, and spreading its rich, enlivening sheen to every household and individual in our country. Now that’s a dream! The other is the kind of sound I used to hear back in the early nineteen-sixties when destructive political dynamite exploded in our capital city, and nightmares became real. Like I said earlier, we learn from the past. In other words, we can choose as well as we can dream.

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