OP:ED Oil: the latest casualty of Guyana’s wars

Nov 30, 2022 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – Guyana’s oil is on the lips of almost everybody.  But it is not on the lips of more than a few Guyanese.  Guyana’s enormous oil finds, mouthwatering wealth, are on the minds of countless many globally.  But it is out there, and that is all there is to its presence for the bulk of Guyanese.  Guyanese do think of oil and what it could mean, but there is a problem.  It is a big one, and because of that what we should get as our fair share goes up in smoke.  From my perspective, this fabled oil wealth, this grandest of natural resource prize, is the latest casualty of Guyana’s politics and racial wars. Those wars have been ugly and self-defeating.  Worse still, our politics lead us to no other place.

Every essential component of Guyanese life narrows down to this blocked roadway: PPP and PNC, Indian and Black.  Even for something as ground-breaking as oil.  Woe to those, who stand at the side, or get caught in the middle.  There is no space, not a crevice, for independents or centrists, who are compelled to break their own ground, and blaze their own trail.  I provide a handful of simple ingredients of national life, and these should confirm where this country is mired, and what they mean for the oil riches that are ours to command and control, savour its blessings.

Our churches that reflect the plurality of this society, its demographics to some imperfect degree, have become a bed of nails: disagreement and distancing.  Who is for the PPP and who is PNC, and this is in houses of worship.  If there can’t be some maturity, the needed fidelity to things of a higher nature and calling in believed spiritual places, then it is folly to think, to hope, that there can be oneness in our agitated secular environment.

Our elections are battlefields that bring out the worse in us, pit the two major groups against each other, and suck in those insensible enough to draw near. There is nothing new about this, but regardless of how often it is said, written, repeated, there is a certain grimness and shrinking that emerges, as though learning for the first time.  It takes a special stomach to absorb this kind of Guyana, a rare kind of mindset to ever be comfortable with where and how we are.  It could be national elections or local government ones, and the brutal fights, slights, and spites resulting wound all.  Even the winners, but still there is persisting with what devastates, what has failed.

Our governance is only about politics.  There is nothing else, positive or negative, that can wrap it more tightly, more meaningfully.  Because politics is about race, and the racial divide, and racial rages, bitterness, and animosities, then it is back to PPP and PNC, Indian and Black.  It is about what is channeled to whom, who is channeled along a certain line, and where all end up: in minefields and behind barbed wires.  This is where Guyana’s governance (and politics) has led all citizens, willingly or not, cleverly and powerfully.

From this incendiary, heaving pond, the biggest blessing that Guyanese could ever have dreamed of has flowed. Oil.  There is enough for all to get something of meaning, a difference-maker in their existence.  Smaller, unattached minds like mine think so.  Except that it is not to be.  It is elections, governance, politics all over again, and taking control of us with their madness, making us run uncaringly, uncontrollably along.  Indian and Black Guyanese converted to helpless pawns in the hands of political masters, reacting instinctively to their dictates, even when their own interests are menaced.  In brief: the wealth from our rich oil endowments is sacrificed at the altar of local politics.  Better to present this with less refinement.

For the PPP rank-and-file partisans, some people who are in need, it is if the President and Vice President say so about this oil, then that’s all we need to know, good enough for us. From across the divide in the PNC camp, if the Opposition Leader does not make oil one of his signature issues, his burning passion, then let it be, for that relays to us all that we should be about, where this oil is concerned.  Exxon and other foreigners prosper at the expense of all Guyanese.

The sum of our handicaps is that our politics and prejudices are more pleasing and profitable than the American billions represented by this oil; whether our rightful share comes to us really doesn’t mean that much.  Politics suppressing commonsense. Oil companies are victorious.  Guyanese are happy to grovel in the dust under the boot of foreigner calling the shots here.  Meanwhile our wars continue to rage.  Oil is the first citizen shot.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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