Jagdeo concerned about everything, but Guyana’s interests

Jun 16, 2023 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Guyana’s Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo has convinced himself that he is the smartest man around. What he fails to appreciate is that he comes across more as the slickest one anywhere. In his efforts to slide from corner to corner where the nation’s oil patrimony is concerned, and rejects working diligently to get the most out of it, he highlights how much of weak leader, a poor presence, and a laughable figure he has become.

Consider how Jagdeo shifts from foot to foot to escape doing what is best for Guyana and its hopeful population of poor and struggling. He was first concerned about foreign investors being rewarded at an attractive level that is keeping with the risks they take. We have no quarrel with that, fully favour it. Investors must make money, but so must Guyana, and it is not 2% royalty and no taxes paid by ExxonMobil, to point to only two top line issues. Simply put, and in the most unmoving terms, Guyana must get more from its oil wealth, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The problem, and it is at crisis proportions, is that Vice President Jagdeo has openly abandoned even the appearance of being partially committed (partially, not fully) to wringing more out of ExxonMobil for Guyana. He is now so far gone that almost all the words that come out of his mouth are about either foreign investors in general, or ExxonMobil in particular. When we listen closely to him, there is scarcely any word about Guyana’s interests, or Guyanese aspirations, and how passionate he is about those.

As if to confirm Jagdeo’s Siamese twin relationship with foreign investors, he moved from being passionate about returns (profits) for them, and came up with a fresh, new gimmick. Jagdeo did his best to convince the Guyanese public that any move to renegotiate the abominable 2016 ExxonMobil oil contract would chase away foreign investors. His exact words were that “investors spook easily.” Almost overnight, Jagdeo came up with the snake charmer’s song that sings about how renegotiating the monstrous ExxonMobil contract would send investors running to the CJIA for the next American Airlines flight. In his speed and determination to look out first and foremost for the interests of foreign investors, what Jagdeo neglected to notice was how much he exposed his nakedness.

It is his naked fear about upsetting big corporate movers and shakers of ExxonMobil, such as Darren Woods and Alistair Routledge. It is his naked nervousness about doing anything that disturbs the peace of mind of ExxonMobil’s bigshots, which is why he flees in abject cowardice whenever any conversation, any call, any clamour surfaces about renegotiating the vile ExxonMobil contract. What Jagdeo has been doing is running around, hiding behind any rock he can find, or submerging himself in any hole that he believes gives him some suitable cover. The reality that the man in charge of the nation’s oil wealth refuses to recognize is that he more that he runs and hides, the more he exposes his feebleness, his nakedness, and his fickleness.

Whatever potion the chiefs at ExxonMobil have given Vice President Jagdeo to absorb only succeeds in bringing on more convulsions leading him to tie himself into knots from which he cannot extricate himself. The latest is the new spin and rhyme that he puts in his oil poems: he is worried about slowing down the speed of offshore oil operations, and all of its other supporting components. His own words condemn him over and over: “my concern has been about killing the momentum….” The hopes of Guyanese are being killed, the dreams of citizens are being killed, and Jagdeo is more concerned about “killing the momentum” that benefits ExxonMobil and its corporate comrades most handsomely.

It is the same weak and washed up Jagdeo from before, who was so focused on ‘investor risks and investor return’ but not having a single care about a fair, right, and proper return for the Guyana people, the owners of the oil wealth. The Guyanese people who have the biggest interest in the oil are left hanging, their destiny sacrificed by Jagdeo in his homage and repeated prostrations to foreign investor interests.

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Bharrat Jagdeo, Editorial, ExxonMobil, Guyana, Vice President

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