Oil wealth trickling down to the masses is nothing but a pipe dream

Feb 08, 2019 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,

Many of my fellow Guyanese think that now that oil is found and would be welled in Guyana, we would be a rich nation. On the other hand, there are many of us who would say, ‘Ask the citizens of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Nigeria, Uganda, Sudan, Venezuela, Brazil and Trinidad, how well the oil trickledown theory is working for them so far’.
The citizens of many of these oil-rich countries have only the results of a bomb trickledown campaign to show for their oil — in the form of a bomb crater 20 feet wide and 10 feet deep, where their family homes once stood.
In the view of many of us, Guyana’s oil wealth would never trickle down to the masses; that wealth is reserved for those in power, and already rich and wanting to get richer.
Just look at the culture of Guyana and you can tell what would happen to the proceeds from oil. Oil wealth trickling down to the masses is nothing but a pipe dream. It has never happened in any Third World country, and will never happen here in my beloved land.
This world is an extremely brutal place; I remain pessimistic about Guyana being an exception to the norm, as obtains in Third World countries with copious amounts of natural resources. We wonder, do we in Guyana have the metaphorical “brains and mindset” to keep the potential oil wealth in Guyana? For the time being, the jury is out on this matter!

Yours faithfully,
Rooplall Dudhnath

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