The Private Sector

Mar 26, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – The Private Sector is in play, and it is glad to allow itself to be played by cunning leaders in today’s government. The private sector is playing for money, as much as it can grab and get, and some of its bigger and more powerful members will do anything to get the best share of Guyana’s oil and other money as is possible. As more and more Guyanese are seeing the light, it is becoming abundantly clear how far the private sector has gone, how far it will do, and how it doesn’t give a hoot about how it looks.
Guyana’s private sector is big and it has involved itself in what is best described as bad business. To put the best spin on this, it is the kind of business that will bring many of the people in the local private sector, already inestimably rich from Guyana’s bounties, even more untold riches from its oil and other natural resources endowments. Many members of Guyana’s private commercial sector have positioned themselves well. They are at the side of powerful ruling political leaders who can make things happen for them with the snap of a finger. Just like that many hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions, come to them through contract awards, land grants, and other huge multibillion dollar public-private undertakings. When the influential private sector people are not in the ear of even more influential political powers, they are at their feet.
They are at the feet of political leaders, who can make them or break them. So, they grovel before PPP/C Government leaders and willingly volunteer to rub their own noses in the dirt to get a piece of the oil action, a big piece, and many of them. The things that people are doing for money, the gutters into which they readily lower themselves, to get near the oil, through consortia arrangements, through subcontracts, and through a host of downstream business developments! Nothing is left out, nowhere is off-limits, and nobody else must get any part of Guyana’s oil prizes. That is, if many huge presences in Guyana’s private sector have their way. They are that insatiably greedy, they are that low that they will stoop to conquer the hearts of leaders just as criminally minded as themselves.
It is why they make such a public spectacle of themselves, and without a shred of shame for their prostrations, their willing slaveries that all the world observes and shrinks in horror. It is how many, too many, in Guyana’s growing private sector embarrass themselves, how they humiliate themselves, and how they condemn themselves. Other Guyanese are speaking out in scorn, with more than a few calling such grovelling Guyanese in the local private sector as blindly loyal politically. What do they know! That is what builds banks and makes vaults overflow. That is what builds great fortunes for generations to come, and which reminds us of what Honoré de Balzac once said. He said that behind every great fortune, there is an equally great crime.
Great fortunes are in play in today’s Guyana, thanks to our massive oil wealth. Men will go to great lengths to get the greatest share of that wealth, even if it means that this has to be at the expense of their poorer compatriots. Thus, if it has to be ‘blindly loyal’ politically, so be it. If it has to be sickeningly crawling, then that is what it will be from Guyana’s private sector, for the most part. Because that is what the political territory calls for, what pleases the political bosses, then just let it be.
Where oil money is concerned men have no pride, they lose any self-respect and dignity that they may have had. They sell themselves for a sweet piece of the pie, and the larger the slices, more like the wedges, the better. This is what has happened in the Middle East and in parts of Africa, and right around the corner in next door Venezuela, even with our brothers in Trinidad. The favoured few ensure that they are well aligned (blindly loyal), so that they do very good when oil money millions are in play.

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