The ExxonMobil Guyana oil partnership

May 28, 2023 Editorial

Kaieteur News – This is a peculiar 50:50 partnership between ExxonMobil and Guyana. In one year alone, the American oil supergiant, ExxonMobil, rakes in US$5.9 billion, while poverty stricken, complacent Guyana collects US$2.4 billion as its share of profit and royalties from 2020 to the end of the first quarter of this year. For emphasis, one side to this oil partnership is that (ExxonMobil) gobbles up US$5.9 billion in a single year, while the other side (Guyana) gets a total of US$2.4 billion as its take for three plus years.

The numbers are in ExxonMobil’s records, and they speak at high volumes. This is supposed to be the ‘fairness’ of a half and half partnership. If this is that kind partnership, then the Guyana side languishes in the dungeons of the worst financial jail, while the other equal partner soars to the heights in an economic jumbo jet. This is what ExxonMobil’s Viceroy in Guyana, Mr. Alistair Routledge, is proud to tell Guyanese is the best deal ever. We think that Mr. Routledge could be possibly excused, given that his mind is overloaded from counting the cash that ExxonMobil gouges from Guyana.

This is the man that Vice President, Bharat Jagdeo, hails as Guyana’s best friend. This is the same oil contract that the same Jagdeo used to curse without fail. This is the same obscene, contract that Bharat Jagdeo distances himself as much as he can. ExxonMobil is swimming at olympic speed in the billions reaped, ripped off, from Guyana, while Guyana is drowning in the weakness, ineptitude, and cowardice of those the citizens elected to lead them.

Dr. Jagdeo is all but helpless to do anything about this lopsided, vulgar swindling contract. But he is not alone in his timidity and hesitancy, his leadership fear and trembling before the foreign exploiters and enslavers of which America’s ExxonMobil stands first in line. There is also the Opposition Leader, Mr. Aubrey Norton, who is but a twin of Vice President Jagdeo, where this 2016 oil contract is concerned, and whenever renegotiation of it becomes the central national conversation. Like the Vice President, the Opposition Leader is also shrinking and shirking his primary duty to do better for Guyana, to get more for Guyanese.

The poor of Guyana are strapped and struggling; they have their backs to the wall, and their noses rubbed in the ground, when they cannot afford to purchase the basics for a decent living, a dignified existence. It is at times like these that the sharpest, the strongest, and the wisest are all brought out of real leaders. They stand up and fight for their people, the so-called richest in the world, but who cannot put three simple meals on the table, when the day comes.

How can an oil deal that is so blatantly in favor of one side of a partnership ever be considered to be fair and rich and acceptable to the people struggling for survival on the poor and exploited part of it? How can any leader with any testicular fortitude stand idly by, actually make excuses for the leading rip-off artist, even defend it, could ever be considered anything but a sellout, and number among the rankest of betrayers of a nation and its peoples? But this is what the suffering citizens of Guyana are forced to cope with, to manage to survive alongside somehow.

Any contract for any precious commodity that is so heavily titled towards one partner can never be said to be a contract of equals. It is a deal made in hell with the devil as the beneficiary, and with the people of Guyana as the human sacrifices, who are nothing but the roped around and handed over victims. This is the reality of Guyanese with their own political leaders trading their aspirations away, spiking their dreams, through their self-serving schemes, who still bizarrely claim to have the interests of the people at heart.

ExxonMobil can delight its workers, shareholders, and other stakeholders with the numbers from Guyana’s oil. Meanwhile, the Guyanese shareholders in this national patrimony are left holding a bag that has pennies for their wealth, and a hole at the bottom that drains into ExxonMobil’s greedy vacuum of a mouth.