Updated oil laws helpful but what of people, financing, tools

Apr 24, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – We support any continuing updating of oil laws already on the books, but on the condition that such modernising represents actual progress, is the full package. The interests of all citizens, those owning this wealth, must always be of the highest priority. From the record, Guyanese political leaders have grown very skilled at projecting that they are all for those local interests. Yet, the reality is that Guyanese have still haemorrhaged through the nose, eyes, ears, and mouth, after all these updating of laws have been finalised and made official. Somehow, we end up in a worse state, instead of the imagined better that didn’t come to pass.
When there is updating of laws locally, leading political figures proudly take centre stage and make speeches intended to inspire confidence, build trust, and pretend to get the best out of whatever is the primary issue under consideration for Guyanese. We will say this in the frankest terms: they lie. Our political leaders have lied and misled and abused the faith placed in them. They do so below the surface, which they get away with for a time, until some Guyanese get wiser as to what is really going on with the updated laws below the surface. This usually occurs when some scrutineers dig deep enough and lay bare the loopholes deliberately left for the resourceful to exploit and bypass the seemingly strict requirements (on paper) of the law.
We say ‘on paper’ because updated laws, be such of oil or forestry or the environment, are there for sure, sometimes in reasonably acceptable forms. But it is what follows afterwards that confirms the effectiveness and usefulness of the laws. When there are just there for display on a shelf in some state agency’s library then they have no meaning, might as well have been spared the effort and expense to bring them into existence. This is what has happened to a significant degree in Guyana, which facilitates influential insiders gaming the system by getting around them, as if they don’t exist.
Moreover, when the rules and regulations, with which organisational policies and procedures go hand in hand, are also largely left to gather dust in desk drawers, or to line walls, through lack of implementation and enforcement, then the original objectives of either protecting or benefiting the people who they were made for fall by the wayside. The original meanings, intents, and purposes of the updated laws, supposedly capturing the will of the people, are all defeated.
There is still another note, another aspect of updated laws that should be given the fullest critical consideration. This time the focus is on the available hands and minds who will make the new laws work, the boots on the ground so to speak. The bodies must not just be there to take up space and satisfy bureaucratic numbers. Rather, there must be the proven skills, credible credentials, supporting body of related work, and what is of priceless significance, the complementing courage and ethics to obtain the quantity and quality of results desired.
Certainly, we have laws, and sometime soon may even have the kind of oil laws of which we could be justifiably proud. But this is where reality douses us with an icy bath. Where are the people to provide proper oversight, and to the most robust degree? Where are the state officers who are able and willing to enforce these laws on behalf of Guyanese with the fullness envisioned? Where are the types of people not beholden to political masters and who will draw the line? Where is the appropriate financing to enable crucial institutions to deliver? What systems and technologies have we given them to do the sensitive work involved, perform at consistently high levels?
We can choke ourselves with more necessary laws, but it is time that we stop making total fools of ourselves. We cannot be about updating laws on a half-cocked, half-baked, and half-assed manner, like we do. We have to go the whole nine yards, with the corresponding cohort of skilled, dependable, and trustworthy officers to make those laws sing. When they do so for Guyanese, other people have to dance to our tune. Stop the games.

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