ExxonMobil, Guyana’s master: Routledge, the new Massa

Aug 23, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – What is shared today must be done in the rawest terms, so that it is imprinted on the consciousness of all Guyanese exactly what is happening to them. It is what has taken root here, grows daily, with greater and greater impacts on our present, our future, and our children’s future. This great national oil wealth that is supposed to bring so much new prosperity to each of us individually, is a great mirage, the smoke, which we see, but never really grasp. This is thanks to the incomparable greed, the endless covetousness, of our oil master, ExxonMobil, and the current New Massa powerfully installed in his lavish Big House, from where he takes stock of Plantation Guyana, while speaking down to his Guyanese slaves and serfs.

The commodities before were in the land, and what came from its rich soil: sugar, tobacco, and cotton in the American South. Even the Americans themselves, those who were appalled and repelled enough, were compelled to call it for what it was, which was the ‘odious institution’ of slavery. People robbed of their freedom, their humanity, their dignity, their spirituality, and their beauty for centuries. In Mexico and Peru, the commodities were gold and silver, which they took away by the overloaded galleon to build their palaces and monuments, while enriching their own communities. The Indian, Inca, Aztec Carib, and Arawak were doomed for extinction due to the superior technology of their invaders, and betrayals at the hands of their own cunning, collaborating brothers with the arriving predators. Africans and Indians were civilised, while they were brutalised and pauperised by the old masters from the pages of history.

Old history is making history in today’s new Guyana. It is the Guyana of oil, which means ExxonMobil and all its new, sophisticated technology, modern boats to carry away the oil treasure, and craven local brothers only too delighted to work inside the Big House standing tall and majestic and just as rapacious in Plantation Guyana. Yesterday, it was sugar, in this 21^st century, it is this precious commodity that the whole world desires so addictively known as oil. On top of all this wealth in Guyana, a man named Routledge reigns in regal splendor. He is the New Massa.

Like the old slave masters, Massa Routledge tells Guyanese how good they have it, how well they are doing, how happy they must be. He has his calculators, his percentages, and his own brand of mysterious mathematics. Also, he ensures that he always walks around with his hymnbook to sing sweet songs to poor, hungry, weak Guyanese to instill false hopes in them. It is of how much they are getting, and how rich they are going to get, and all because ExxonMobil is such a partner giving Guyana its best ever contract. He and ExxonMobil are not partners, they are enslavers filled with fancy talk that enriches their own people, their own workers, their own investors, and their own futures.

Guyanese harbour high hopes, dream bright dreams, that their day will come. Just like the slaves of old, they yearn to break from this bondage of cunning men, like Massa Routledge, who turn their own Guyanese brothers and sisters against them for a few toys, pats on the head. And just like the slaves of America, the Indians of North, Central, and Latin America, the Africans of Africa, and the Indians of India, Guyanese will come to realise that ExxonMobil and Massa Routledge are exactly like the American slave masters and British viceroys and Spanish conquistadores that pillage and plundered other poor, divided places before.

Today they come with gifts to grab this country’s gold. Guyana’s gold is its sweet, light liquid Black Gold lying in vast reservoirs and lakes beneath its seabed. The mouths of men water, their eyes mist over, and their hearts turn stone cold. It is business, the business of enslaving contracts, of conspiring ‘house slaves’, and of the whip of words from the likes of Massa Routledge that bite deeply and stir great rage at the injustice of it all. These people are not friends, they are the most ferocious of fiends. Massa Routledge is the leader of the pack.

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