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Oil contract – we needed money

Jul 04, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – “We needed money -Ramjattan” (KN July 3). Just when we thought that we have heard everything that has wisdom missing from it, we heard that “we needed money.” If the thinkers, the Cabinet, the leaders, and the final decision maker in the previous APNU+AFC Coalition Government looked at our desperate need for money and arrived at where they did with our oil, then there is nothing that they would not have done, nothing so tragically unthinking to which they would not lower themselves. In other words, there was no limit that would have held them back from engaging in things that sold this country and its peoples into slavery.

Poor countries are always acutely short of money, which is a given and is well known globally. This makes them all but helpless preys to the voracious foreign corporate exploiters that come to their shores hunting for cheap investment opportunities and rich returns for themselves. From that statement about the desperate need of this country for money, Guyana was transformed into the plumpest of sitting ducks waiting for the plucking and cooking. So, we ended up being burnt badly by the worst oil contract in the history of men engaging each other and agreeing to a deal on not just the oil that gushes from the ground, but anything. Though breathing in laboured fashion, we were as good as dead by the time that contract between Guyana and ExxonMobil was inked. That deathlike state is ours for decades to come unless we find it in ourselves to rise from the ashes of this most devastating of deals.

Indeed, a powerful case could be made that “we needed money” then, and we still need it today, despite all the downstream effects of our oil sector business spreading in Guyana. The reach and benefits of the cascades of cash are not touching the great bulk of everyday Guyanese limping along in life. But, at no time, should we have reached that stage, harboured any such visions, that because we needed money so badly that we would be a party to a contract that prostituted ourselves to this extent, and in this most haemorrhaging of ways. It would have been bad enough and incomparable enough if this oil deal that we now must coexist with impacted the present generation alone. But as all Guyanese should know by now, this damaging contract enslaves future generations, and surrenders them to the yoke of ExxonMobil on our necks, and its boot on our backs. There are not enough curses in hell to damn the former APNU+AFC Coalition Government for what it has left the peoples of this country with, and how securely it has hogtied this nation to ExxonMobil.

When Guyanese thought that matters couldn’t get worse, in came this PPP/C Government and its leaders, and they are as determined to live with this destructive contract, and not lift a finger to do something about it when opportunities arise. Having made lovely, inspiring promises of how they were going to act against the contract that they condemned in the harshest terms, the President and the Vice President are as silent as lambs, and just as passive, if not powerless. Great things were promised by them, and most Guyanese expected great things of them on this horrendous oil deal. But it is not to be, not when the leaders in this succeeding PPP/C Government are no better than those in the former governing Coalition who came immediately before them.

In fact, these days, observant Guyanese have difficulty in differentiating between the American leaders of ExxonMobil and their own Guyanese leaders in this PPP/C Government. Beside the differences in skin colour, they are just as dogged, just as resistant, and just as unhearing in leaving alone this draining and weakening contract that binds this country and ExxonMobil together. Considering all this there is the temptation to think that the leaders and brain trust in this PPP/C Government are as one with their peers who served in the prior APNU+AFC Coalition Government. That is, their mindset is also “we needed money” and need still more money. There is only one question left: money for whom in this total sellout of Guyana?

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