Gas to energy cost…Why only now?

Jun 30, 2023 Editorial

Kaieteur News – For the longest while, many Guyanese have been asking, pushing, pleading for details about the true cost of the Wales gas-to-energy (GTE) project. The PPP/C Government made it its duty to keep waffling and dodging all inquiries. No supporting documentation was being produced to address the curiosity and concerns of the Guyanese people as to the amount of the new burden to be placed on their heads.

The man standing on the bridge of the national oil boat, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo took slipperiness to new heights when he made it his mission to deliver evasions about the real cost of the GTE project.

It took a court matter to wring the GTE cost from the hands and bowels of the PPP/C Government’s leadership, for whom everything is a secret. The business of the people is not their business, it is exclusively party business. Since the Vice President found himself cornered, and left with no choice, it fell upon Attorney General Anil Nandlall to reveal to the court that the cost of the Wales GTE project currently stands at US$1.7 billion. It is beyond belief that a President, a government, and a leadership cohort that makes longwinded speeches about how it about transparency and accountability can be so much about secrecy.

The plan of the PPP/C Government, which means Vice President Jagdeo, is to yoke Guyanese to US$1.7 billion in new obligations, but keep them in the dark about what is going on. Regardless of how this GTE project is funded, it is the Guyanese people who are obligated in some way, lose something along the way. It could be from oil revenues, or from ExxonMobil making more money from us through its clever equity management, or from outside lenders. Regardless, what could be interpreted from the Vice President’s actions is Guyanese do not need to know how much the GTE project costs.

The Wales GTE project is going to be one of the costliest projects that Guyana will be involved in, and it has got to be paid for through some financing arrangement, but the cost is a State secret. This cannot be democracy, this is perversity of the most daring, the rankest, sort, from the hands of PPP/C architects. A project that started out at a significantly lower price level than that US$1.7 billion is poised to race ahead, barring some last-minute judicial intervention. In fact, ExxonMobil has already started to lay pipelines along the seabed. This is the way that our patrimony is overseen by the PPP/C Government, this is what Guyana’s sovereignty has come to, with ExxonMobil free to do as it pleases, manhandling our government, our leaders, and our visions.

We should slam Attorney General Nandlall for allowing his office (and himself) to be so degraded, that he is joyful at being reduced to an errand boy to cover the caprices of both the government, and its leaders. He has to know that some of his legal exploits are not for the Guyanese people, they are against them, for his party only. This Wales GTE has been a golden child of Bharrat Jagdeo, yet he is ashamed to tell Guyanese of its source. The first thing that citizens want to know is the cost. This should not be a matter of difficulty, a need for secrecy, for any government, for any leader.Gas to energy cost…Why only now?

But despite the pleas and pressure from various voices, Guyanese could not even be told the truth of what it was going to cost them. It is becoming clearer now that most matters of materiality will have to be pushed to the courts for us to get to the bottom of what is really going on with this oil wealth. More and more, the courts of Guyana are going to become the battlefield for squeezing answers out the PPPC Government, and the man in charge of the nation’s patrimony, Vice President Jagdeo. If he is afraid to tell this nation about a project with a US$1.7 billion price tag, then what else is he hiding? How much more is Jagdeo putting his head next to ExxonMobil’s Routledge, and working out schemes to withhold vital information from Guyanese, and haemorrhage their hopes, their prospects?

Guyanese, haemorrhage, nor Vice President Jagdeo, patrimony, Vice President

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