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Oil, virus and politics

Apr 17, 2020 Editorial

Hard, desperate men take gambles that often turn up results which are the opposite of what was calculated. Recently, in international combat chambers, this was what unfolded relative to oil, even a frightening virus. In Guyana, men have done so on the local political chessboard. Like the international experiences, there will be the haunting that comes with reckoning domestically.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin gambled that the Saudis would blink; that they would retreat from challenging his gambit. The Russian erred terribly. For as we know, the Saudis delivered its massive retaliation by deliberately flooding supply lanes and driving down oil prices. This it did to everyone’s economic distress, including their own. The thinking of the Saudis was that two can play at this game, and let’s see who could last longer.
Mistake number one necessitated the unlikely intervention of the American leader, whose own oil sector and the related 10 million direct and indirect jobs (in a reeling, suddenly shaky economy) came under attack. To that could be added the wave of bankruptcies that menaced shale producers, who could no longer compete at the near bottoms which the retaliatory action of the Saudis had driven the industry.
From a pariah of a leader came rare wisdom, a powerful example of always present keen business acumen and instincts. Tents have now folded with agreed-upon supply cuts totaling almost 10 million barrels or 10 percent of daily global output. It should help to stabilize prices in the short run, but it may not be enough, as demand for oil is down by 35%, which means that a considerable gap still exists between demand and supply. It is one that does not appear to be narrowing anytime soon. And this merges smoothly with the second set of mistakes made by powerful men that made life deadly.
Whereas the oil war was over money and supremacy, the pestilence of coronavirus is about life itself, as to one’s chances of being infected by it, and then managing to survive it. The word from China was that top leaders knew early, but withheld information and action until it was too late. The analyses and post-mortems lead in the same direction, and with the same harrowing results in Italy and, to a lesser extent, in Spain. It was of many sick, much lost, and too many dead because of leadership sloth, leadership failure, leadership misjudgments. No number of revealing post-mortems is going to reverse the sicknesses and deaths that come to families, and which confirm the unpardonable mistakes of hubristic men that make for misery and madness.
And with oil and virus as contexts, we come to Guyana and politics. Frankly, it is about nothing else here, since that is all that matters to most Guyanese. To repeat for emphasis: there is nothing else that matters beside elections. Like the Middle Eastern, Asian, and European scenarios, powerful men here gamble on envisioned outcomes. They gamble with numbers, with where they could and should take, should calculations come out along settled preconceptions. And like all of those faraway places that have paid heavy prices in their consequential human and national tolls, here in Guyana, political men do the same while they gamble with the lives of citizens.
They linger purposefully (tracing), they stonewall calculatingly (information), they lift finger late (prioritizing) and the results reflect the mistakes that other men made with oil and the same virus now present here. As Guyanese leaders stare down, they bring down the same troubles that haunted sheiks, the democratically elected, the politically powerful.
Oil markets sometimes resist the whims of men and the wands they wave; prices still drift. And so, too, viruses do not bow before leaders with higher priorities, such as retention of power, or assumption of power. They have a life of their own and humble man in his follies. Fools we are made to be, found wanting when the sternest tests come.
Given where our politics have condemned us, where our elections have imprisoned us, a virus now stalks us and finds us diminished. Local leaders should remember that one about the best laid plans of mice and men….

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