A bare-faced promise of 50,000 jobs for Guyana’s oil industry

Jan 27, 2019 AFC Column, Features / Columnists

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For all of the Opposition Leader’s posturing over the last two-plus years, very few Guyanese are fooled. He lives among a small few who don’t acknowledge the terror that average Guyanese lived with during his reign as President of this country. The way in which the PPP Government handled the mechanics, the horrible stories, the trauma of a frightened nation, and the news of execution-style killings of policemen and women was frightening in itself.
Fast forward to present day and the Opposition Leader’s weekly press appearances in which he paints himself as Guyana’s magnanimous saviour, the only one who is able to transform the nation. It would be laughable if it weren’t so ridiculous, especially when everyone knows that he was the architect who created, and led, Guyana’s worst period of anarchy and cruelty.
Lately, as serious as ever, he comes back with a bare-faced promise of 50,000 jobs within the oil and gas sector for his people once his party returns to power. Since 2017, Exxon and their partners have been training young people in communities and at Exxon’s Centre for Local Business Development. Our youths are being prepared for direct employment in the sector, or for entrepreneurship, i.e. starting up their own businesses.
According to the Energy Chamber of Trinidad & Tobago (ECTT), there are approximately 116 types of businesses related to oil and gas production, storage, transportation, trade and of course, safety and environmental protection.
The ECTT also warned us in 2015 that it is usually very difficult for low to mid-level skilled and semi-skilled persons to get a foothold in oil production. They said that the few who are chosen would have had intense training. The ECTT would know since Trinidad and Tobago has been in the hydrocarbon business for nearly a century.
But the PPP’s front man has promised his supporters that he would manufacture 50,000 jobs as soon as that party seizes power again, and he mentioned it so casually, so en passant. Again he miscalculated by ignoring people’s capacity for ferreting out the truth. He also missed the glaring fact that folks who used to be afraid of him no longer are.
He has made it unequivocally clear that this nation would enjoy no peace if the Coalition Government rigs the next general elections. We’ve said it before and it still applies – the Opposition Leader projects his own twists and turn-backs on to others. He openly threatens the nation with instability because he believes that, just as he is wont to do, the Coalition government would rig the upcoming elections.
Isn’t that treasonous or seditious?
A recording of Jagdeo’s pronouncements has gone viral on social media. He said, “If they think that they can rig the elections and have the kind of peace we have now, they are wrong, very very wrong. I’m making it clear about that, and it is not coded language. The nature of the struggle changes”. He then explained that when it becomes a freedom struggle, the normal rules of protests and civil actions could be changed to whatever form he wishes it to take.
We’d like to thank him for acknowledging that Guyana is now a peaceful nation. We are tired of Jagdeo threatening the people of this nation with violence, threatening to derail our hard-won peace and stability, with the impunity he has bestowed upon himself. It doesn’t take much of a stretch to interpret his threats as treasonous and seditious. We urge the people responsible for the security of this State to place these remarks in context and take appropriate action.
The PPP still seems to be getting away with minimizing or just plainly ignoring the failures that the PPP’s 1999 – 2015 administration has gone in history for. One of the more glaring failures was the totally disastrous multi-billion dollar ‘investment’ in the tottering Skeldon sugar estate. After a lot of hoopla, the first Chinese contractor, China National Technical Import and Export Corporation, handed the rehabilitated factory over to the PPP government in 2009.
Then the real troubles at Skeldon immediately began with every part, punt, crusher and knife in the factory which the contractors had replaced or repaired not working. Less than two years after the celebratory re-commissioning, the factory was closed down again for a major overhaul, then another overhaul, and another rehabilitation. After spending US$200M on the Chinese rehab, the government hired the South African Bosch engineering firm at US$30M to replace the knives that cut up the cane stalks.
Today, all that talk that the ultra expensive Skeldon project was going to revive the dying sugar industry has stopped. Time, and the coming of the coalition government, has nailed that lie, and exposed the fact that the entire sugar industry had been plagued with deep financial and operational problems long before 2009.
Guysuco after 1995 had disastrous management one after the other that made bad decisions that had no benefits for the sugar fields and factories or workers’ welfare. Yet the ‘Leader’ talks on as if the very real problems with sugar began in 2015, telling the sugar workers that he is the only person who could SAVE the industry!
Now, how is it that there is no other PPP source to quote from? There is literally no other head talking but the Opposition Leader’s, even now, more than a week after their presidential candidate was named. He must be the proverbial oxymoronic ‘maximum leader’.

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