Is the Vice President for real?

May 06, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Sometimes the Vice President of Guyana, Bharat Jagdeo, places some issues in the public domain that we wonder if he is for real. That is, if this leader has lost his senses, fights a losing battle in trying to retain his mind. All this takes shape with one of his latest public postures: “VP Jagdeo says… Pres. Ali and Vickram Bharrat should honour promise to release Alison Redford reports on oil projects” -KN May 02). This has to be bizarre, if nothing else.
We at this publication say that for the VP to call on the head of state and the Minister of Natural Resources to release the Redford Reports is sly, self-serving, and definitely on the sickly side. We say this because everything that has to do about oil in this country begins and ends with Vice President Bharat Jagdeo. He is the oil czar, he is the nation’s oil sage (according to his own self-evaluation).According to him, he knows more about this oil of Guyana than anyone else because he has appointed himself to that position, and no one can do anything about that, not even the President. Bharat Jagdeo is the President of Oil.
For Vice President Jagdeo to call on the President to release the Redford Reports is not just strange, it reeks of the disingenuous. He himself had a say in commitments to release the first Redford Report on Payara. The Vice President’s call on the President is a copout, to do what he has always done when the walls close in on some troubling national issue. He passes either the duty or blame on to others. Just remember what he has done to the muzzled and helpless people at Guyana’s Environmental Protection Agency when he passed on oil matters that became too hot and too sticky for him to handle.
The VP has this rabbity habit, this poor practice, of distancing himself from matters that engage national attention and alarm. He plays this game of handing over such burning issues to powerless underlings in the public service. These workers have no idea as to how they must react, what is expected of them, with the boiling hot potato that he dumped in their hands. But the bottom line is that the wily, savvy VP succeeds in pulling another quick trick on Guyanese, when he does these dodges, engages in these oil acrobatics.
Take Vickram Bharrat, for instance. He is the Minister of Natural Resources, which means that normally he would be responsible for oil matters, because oil would fall within his portfolio. But, from every indication, this subject minister is nothing but a place holder to rest dinnerware on, merely a convenient decoration. This is because everything that has to do with oil is closely held to his chest by Vice President Jagdeo. As said earlier, he is Guyana’s President of Oil. The official President, Irfaan Ali, has little say on oil, may actually know next to nothing with what is going on with this oil of ours, because the VP has seized control for himself of all matters, great and small, that has some relationship to oil.

The two Redford Reports, she herself, a figure of continuing controversy in this country, are part of the portfolio of the VP. The VP was intimately involved in the final decision to hire her, despite the protests of Guyanese, including this newspaper. The VP also has an intimate knowledge of what is embedded in those two Redford Reports, and it is our belief, our position, that the PPP/C Government, with the VP in the forefront, has no interest in sharing what is in there with Guyanese. The reality has been the secrecy and the resistance associated with making public these two oil reports.

All Guyana knows all of this, because Vice President Jagdeo name is written all over oil, due to his fingerprints being everywhere where Guyana’s oil is concerned, and from his powerful shadow driving all oil issues to where they are. So, for Bharat Jagdeo to call on President Ali and Minister Bharrat to release the two Redford Reports is a dirty trick, his usual cowardly disappearing act when the going gets tough.

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