Are our politicians out of their depth on how to use oil revenues to transform the society?

May 02, 2021 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,

President Irfaan Ali, in his last press interview, declared there will be no spending of oil revenues any time soon and a development plan will be crafted later in the year. Clearly, the PPP government is without a sense of urgency and a vision to use our oil wealth for national transformation.
Meanwhile in the US, in stark contrast, Joe Biden, 100 days into his presidency, is driving the biggest expansion of American government in decades, an effort to use $6 trillion in federal spending to address social and economic challenges at a scale not seen in a half-century.
In its defence, the PPP will likely point to its initiatives such as in housing and education. But to make its case, it has to identify which of these initiatives is driven by the greater possibilities at hand, and how much of its thinking is outside the regular box.
With oil revenues likely to surpass US$1 billion annually by 2024, little in the last four to five national budgets (yes, my despair also extends to the coalition government) suggests that the country’s development is being propelled towards an inflection point—the point at and beyond which all of us can enjoy the good life. Instead, the political rulership class in Guyana appears still entrapped by the mentality where, in the face of massive national problems, creeping is good enough. No issue better illustrates this stuck mind-set than that of the WPA-proposed cash transfer a few years ago. As a concrete proposal to put oil money directly into the hands of families, the responses to it from the major political parties fully exposed their unpreparedness not only on the proposal itself, but also on the larger question of how to urgently lift Guyanese out of poverty and the other discomforts of life.
Probably sensing this lack of urgency and vision among our politicians, the populace now greets news of new oil finds with a resigned shrug. The excitement has long evaporated. News of more FPSOs and world-beating GDP growth rates seem no more significant than the weather forecast, or the IPL cricket scores.
Given all this disappointment, it is time to ask whether or not our entire political class maybe up to the task of taking the country to join the likes of a Dubai, Norway, or Singapore. A national soul-searching is in order. With money no longer a problem, are we as a nation capable of crafting a radical and ambitious development agenda on the scale of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, or Joe Biden’s Rescue, Family and Job Plans?
National soul-searching must first incite a national intolerance, a collective moral outrage, against several “unacceptables”—those societal failings we have long normalised, but which can be readily fixed. For instance, we must find unacceptable the persistence of poverty in our midst. We must also find unacceptable that we suffer or die from preventable diseases and curable ailments. It must be unacceptable that our built environment (towns and villages) is rife with backwardness, ugliness and filthiness. It is unacceptable that the attitude lurks among our political leaders that the masses must forever be trapped in a dependency relationship with them and their parties. Intolerance of these “nonsenses” must motivate us to build a different Guyana. Just as important, it must force seekers and holders of political office to realise that past and present performance is woefully short of the mark.
We must also decide on a critical issue at the heart of any process to rapidly transform the lives of Guyanese. And that issue concerns the rapid conversion of Guyana into a modern Scandinavian-style welfare state. This is both a moral (the right thing to do) and democratic (what the people desire) imperative. Such a welfare state must not only guarantee free and quality health and education for all. It must also include ambitious social programmes that directly benefit a range of Guyanese in different circumstances and with different needs (such as the elderly, single parents, the newly wed, small entrepreneurs, Indigenous peoples, youths and recent graduates).
Guyana must reach the top on the UN World Happiness Index, along with countries like Finland, Denmark and Switzerland. Our oil blessings now enable us to make our people happy. The lack of urgency and vision among our political class now borders on a dereliction of responsibility. The longer our oil revenues languish in a bank doing nothing for the Guyanese people, the greater the failure.

Sincerely
Sherwood Lowe

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