Another day, another confirmation

Dec 21, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – The International Labor Organization (ILO) put on paper what sensible Guyanese talk about among themselves, some actually place in the public domain. It is that this massive oil wealth is overwhelming us, while subjecting this country to costly exploitations that we can ill afford. What is tragic and criminal about this is that our Politicians know this, yet they have thrown all cautions to the winds and barrel ahead in reckless indifference.

Some knowledgeable Guyanese already knew to a degree where matters stand, but it comforts most locals to hear the same things from foreigners. What the ILO presents to us is staggering (‘Lack of qualified persons, limited workforce, key weaknesses in Guyana’s oil and gas industry -New ILO report’ -KN December 20). Four out of five Guyanese of workforce age (more than 80%) possess only a secondary school education. Just as bad, if not worse, is the fact that in the final 35 years of the last century about 90% (9 of 10) Guyanese with higher learning credentials emigrated. Though that trend may have slowed to some extent, foreign shores are a greater attraction for Guyanese university graduates, notwithstanding the lure of our immense oil wealth.

When these two numbers are studied (only these two), it is beyond doubt, beyond contentiousness, that Guyana is woefully underprepared, and disastrously deficient, to benefit from this natural resource endowment that is the envy of the world. We need somewhere over a quarter of a million qualified workers, and we have a mere 39,000 plus in hand, or less than one worker for every six needed. If all of those Guyanese of working age that are not employed, or fully employed, were to be available and recruited, we would still be 100,000 workers short. This is the stark reality of Guyana and this great oil wealth that keeps building and building.

For its part, the PPP/C Government and its leading players have approached this oil wealth in the worst way conceivable. Commonsense and prudence would require that exploration and production activities be pursued at a pace which allows us to come to grips with what we have, and the sum of our human assets. This would facilitate a clear understanding of what we don’t know, permit an appreciation of where we need to be most urgently, and when the sprawling gaps are identified, be wise enough to recognize the difference.

We at this publication have repeatedly made these recommendations. Denouncement and dismissal have been the responses from the PPP/C Government and its agents, quite a few of them numbering in the ranks of the unscrupulous. This does not mean that it is a time to throw up hands, and let matters be. The message must continue to be sounded and pounded. We must slowdown, more for control of our own destiny, than to let our prosperity be dictated by outsiders with their own heightened profit agenda. They could (and currently do) profit in more ways than we can begin to grasp, and all because we are in such a mad rush, this inexplicably frenzied haste.

When we don’t have our own people looking out for our own interests according to our own timetable, then we are digging our own graves. We are staring at a tragedy in the making. When the few Guyanese experts that we actually have are kicked out by the PPP/C Government from any close oversight, any hands-on involvement, in this ballooning trillion-dollar oil sector, then our political bosses are nothing but the most heinous of enemies to the Guyanese people. In a nutshell, it is how an already terrible situation is made tragic. The politics or philosophy of any Guyanese should not matter at all, not when it is our enormous oil endowment that hangs in the balance. Wealth that is subjected to every kind of tricky maneuver that can be conceived by the foreign oil powers operating here, with America’s ExxonMobil standing at the front of the line.

It stands to reason that when we are so acutely short of quality people, then there will be a corresponding deficit in our expected prosperity. ExxonMobil and company will see to that, make hay while we are so devastatingly shorthanded.