Guyana falling back, Jagdeo racing forward

Nov 13, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – It is what was suspected all along because it is plain commonsense. One of this country’s crucial oversight agencies, the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA), lives with the stark reality that it is falling behind in its responsibility to oversee some key aspects of the nation’s ballooning oil sector. This is what the article titled, ‘Auditor General report reveals…GRA struggles to find experts to beef up capacity to monitor oil costs…as Jagdeo races ahead with more oil projects’ (KN November 8). It didn’t take a wizard to appreciate that this was going to happen, given where agencies like the GRA start out, and the obstacles that they must deal with, to deliver on their duties.

Considering this bleak situation, some questions must be asked. What is Vice President Bharat Jagdeo, the man in charge of Guyana’s oil sector, really up to? Where does he think that Guyana will end up, when he throws caution to the winds, when he does the opposite of what he should be doing? That is, slowdown and not race ahead so recklessly. How can he not know that his actions can have only one outcome for Guyana, which is to leave it in a hole? Studying his actions, is he ever about what is beneficial for Guyana? Or are his actions relative to the oil sector (and everything else) about what meets with approval of foreign companies operating here?

What the Audit Office report noted is that the Petroleum Revenue Department of the GRA is short of 36 employees. For emphasis, that is 36 urgently needed workers, and not 6. We don’t think that any department in an entity of the size of the GRA could function at any level, and deliver much of its work plan, when it so shorthanded. Among the skilled positions unfilled are those of advisors, auditors, risk managers, and planners. In a sensitive area such as the GRA’s Petroleum Revenue Department, these are the kinds of officers that are missing, and which the agency is experiencing trouble recruiting. Of note, that same Unit should have a petroleum engineer on staff, most likely to advise and guide those doing the checking of how the money is spent.

To sum up the straits of the GRA, the agency is losing people, and fighting an uphill battle to get people to join the organization. To repeat the obvious, the people on the job are not anywhere close to the number needed to get the job done, a barely passable job. There are simply too many holes, with those present forced to scramble around, and stretched way too thin. But Guyana’s top oilman, Bharat Jagdeo, is rushing ahead like a man possessed by some uncontrollable spirit. He is running headlong into more projects, when this country’s cup is already overflowing from the things that it just cannot get done.

Jagdeo has to know this, and of the exposures and related damages that are repeatedly hitting Guyana for six. Jagdeo has to know that the savvy and tricky foreign oil companies are well aware of our limitations, of what we can monitor properly and what we can’t, and take the fullest advantage of our woeful situation. It is a mouth-watering and irresistible one for companies such as ExxonMobil, which don’t ever let an opportunity pass by to exploit the weak and the available. There is no joy in saying this, but Guyana is weak and vulnerable, and as Jagdeo runs forward like a chicken without a head, he makes Guyanese weaker and more vulnerable.

The oil leader, Jagdeo, is dragging Guyana down, and it is clearer by the day that he is the wrong man to give any responsibility in this nation’s trillion-dollar oil business. Every new project that he sprints forward with, he lends still another hand to the rapacious exploits of the cunning oil companies. When we think of the struggles of the GRA, the situation at the Environmental Protection Agency cannot be much different, just a matter of degree. The last question is how long President Ali standby and allow Jagdeo to behave like a race car driver (without vision or brakes) in his management of our oil business, and bring us all to ruin?

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