Whose treasures?

Sep 03, 2017 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols

The unearthing of oil and natural gas beneath our Stabroek Block has set me thinking along these lines:

In the early days of prehistory, human beings would have observed natural phenomena with awe. It can be assumed that lightning, thunder, earthquakes, volcanic blasts, cyclones and floods would have stupefied them.
Later on the Greeks and Romans among other ancient peoples sought to create and conjure up gods to hold responsible for such unfathomable acts. And thousands of years before technology exploded they would have wondered what lay beyond and beneath their terrestrial home.
A million years ago there was no Guyana; no man-made nations. According to scientists, there had been Pangea – a supercontinent under which lay perils, wonders and riches yet undreamed of.
If what geologists tell us is true, after Pangea fractured, oil, gas, minerals, and precious metals would have formed and settled there for countless millennia undisturbed by human intrusion. Then along came tribes, clans, nations, borders, and civilization, the dissection of continents and the divvying-up of islands.
The great slab of rock that was to become the Guiana Shield was one piece of a giant jigsaw puzzle. Still hidden were the minerals, precious metals – and oil. Whose treasures were they?
Ever since groups of people first formed themselves into communities, thousands of years ago, the notion of ownership of land and its boundaries existed, along with sharing, cooperating, and quarreling over it; and later warring over its visible resources. Geologists tell us that stone, ceramics and metals were first ‘mined’ to make tools and weapons during the late Paleolithic Age some 40,000 years ago. I suppose we can safely presume that the latter were not used solely for hunting animals. Cave paintings suggest that humans killed other humans with arrows 30,000 years ago, while archaeological evidence dates such warfare to about half that age.
In any case when New World lands were first populated, between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, we can only speculate as to what the region that now includes Guyana looked like and how the people lived.
History teaches us that there was a steady growth of settled communities, and a gradual transition from hunting and foraging to farming; later cultures and civilizations such as the Maya, Olmec, Aztec, and Inca flourished. It also tells us that post-Columbus, Europeans initiated an ‘exchange’ of goods with native Americans during which rare indigenous commodities were swapped for European smallpox, measles, horses and guns. Then there was the gold and silver loot spearheaded by conquistadores Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro, aided by ethnic divisions and disease, as the South American Aztec and Inca empires crumbled in an onslaught of Spanish greed.
In the case of Guyana, her subsurface minerals lay practically undisturbed until less than 200 years ago. It seems that our then indigenous populations, colonists, and plantation workers knew little of what mineral wealth lay beneath the earth and rivers they hunted, fished, and tilled, until the latter half of the nineteenth century. It would be interesting to find out just how much, how little, or if at all, our Amerindians knew of what had happened in Mexico and Peru and whether or not such knowledge may have hindered them from unearthing the treasures beneath their feet.
Some time ago I read (maybe not in full context) in a local National Development Strategy outline that “Amerindian rights to sub-surface minerals are excluded by the nature of the title. The mining that does take place on titled lands is either illegal or is the result of a private arrangement with a villager, the Captain, or the Village Council.
At the same time there is mining by non-Amerindians on lands … claimed by Amerindian communities that lack any form of title. According to Guyanese law, if an Amerindian wishes to engage in mining on his community’s land, that individual must give up the special rights, enshrined in law, that the individual enjoyed as an Amerindian.” Who made our laws anyway, and to what extent is this one still valid? Just asking!
A deceptively simple question to ask now is who truly owns the mass of land, water, and everything in between from crust to core we call Earth? The answer may vary – from that thing called ‘the state’ and governments to communal groups and individuals.
The liberal British New Statesman a few years ago noted that ‘the relationship between humans and land begins with a fundamental claim by some people or countries to ‘own’ land’ and includes those that allow citizens ‘to own land to which they hold legal title, and those that grant only tenancies to their citizens, permitting the state to claim a total prior right to the use of all land within its borders.’ And its mineral wealth as collateral perks. Which are we?
It added, for example, that the current British monarch is the world’s primary feudal landowner as ‘Queen of 32 countries, head of a commonwealth of 54 countries … and legal owner of 6.6 billion acres of land, one-sixth of the earth’s land surface’. Who knew? Before feudalism there was the idea that all land and people were the possession of ‘the gods’ who devolved that ownership to a human representative.
New Statesman added that if the Queen could convert her land holdings into cash, this ‘diminutive octogenarian’ would not only be the richest individual on earth, but also the richest person who has ever lived. Take that you Rockefellers and Rothschilds!
Now step back to Guyana. Who owns the land and its resources? Certainly the state/government and the people who live on it and use it in any number of ways. But when foreign companies (Bookers, Alcan, Omai, ExxonMobil) manage and exploit these resources and deplete them to the detriment of our people as many have observed and predicted, would we still own them the way we think we do?
If you have a rapidly-depleting block of some natural resource that is economically managed by a foreign entity, and you do not have the technical and financial expertise to know if your so-called profit is fair, then do you still ‘own’ that resource?
And if it is determined by law that you have been robbed, would you have the kind of legal expertise to enable you to recoup what was stolen from you? Will Chad, for example, ever collect the $74 billion fine from ExxonMobil as ordered by its High Court? Think!
Gold, diamonds, bauxite, manganese, stone, (including the semi-precious variety) timber, industrial ores, oil, and who knows what else still lie in usable and commercial quantities in our land and our territorial waters. We boast of them and constantly tout their potential to transform our economy and culture.
We have our citizens, including our first nation people, pork-knockers, dredge owners, miners, and precious metal dealers. We also have individuals and groups of foreign prospectors, not to mention hungry Venezuela’s claim to Essequibo and her adjacent waters.
Individuals and nations have conquered and claimed ‘God’s’ lands for self and country for millennia, and the treasures they enfold don’t discriminate as to whom they yield their bounty. So, with bemused expression and tongue-partly-in-cheek I ask again, “Whose treasures are they?”

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