‘Don’t get giddy over cleaning, catering, taxi service contracts or money in oil account’

Dec 08, 2022 News

…real benefits can only be realised with strong institutions – Int’l Experts warn

Kaieteur News – While Guyana has made successful strides in ensuring oil companies have 90 to 100 percent of their contracts for transportation, catering and janitorial services go to locals, it should not distract from the bigger picture.

In fact, international oil and gas experts are cautioning Guyanese to avoid buying into the dream that more money in the nation’s oil account or accomplishments on the local content front, automatically translates to a better standard of living.

According to the industry experts, the key to real transformative growth lies with having strong institutions and an experienced cadre of professionals overlooking the spending of the oil wealth. The experts were keen to highlight that Trinidad and Tobago underscores how critical it is to robust institutions and professionals in place. The experts said Trinidad has been in the game for more than a century while adding that it has made some admirable moves to ensure that its industry had significant levels of capacity building and technology transfer. In spite of having attained this fantastic feat, Trinidad and Tobago’s economy is desperately trying to get back on its feet.

One of the stakeholders who spoke with this newspaper said, “Everyone can see that Trinidad is struggling so it shows that having local content policies and supporting laws are very good virtues. They are necessary but trust me, they are not sufficient and Guyana must not run away with that idea.”

The energy specialist added, “You must have proper governance and oversight or else it will all fail, all your investment will fail or will lose value day after day.”
Further to this, the experts stressed that at the heart of Trinidad’s struggle today is the lack of accountability of the regulators of the sector.
In this regard, one of the stakeholders said, “I will give you an example if you think I am mistaken. The law says that every company operating in the oil and gas industry, no matter what they do, be it pipelines or gas petrochemicals, must have a licence. But you know what, there were many companies in the petrochemical industry who did not have licences and they have been operating for 40 years.”

As a result of this state of affairs, the industry expert said there was extreme opposition and difficulties to implement guidelines in a bid to regularise that section of the industry. In light of this lawlessness that was allowed, it prevented the government from abiding with a section of the law that requires a register of such licences to be properly kept and made available for public scrutiny.

“…So you see, one can get very complacent in the face of oil money…Guyana needs to be aware of this danger,” the expert added while stressing the need for civil society actors to communicate the poignancy of these arguments to the man on the ground.

In conclusion, industry analysts are of the view that Guyana has to build a clear line of sight for communicating activities, impact, and outcomes to the citizens and make people feel that they have a right to demand better and know how they can go about doing so.

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