When secrecy is the status quo

Jul 20, 2023 Editorial

Kaieteur News – The PPP/C Government had several choices when it returned to office. The first was whether to be about secrecy or straight talk. The second was what is best: secrecy or give the Guyanese people some substances that would be proof positive that their government, leaders, ministers are doing their best to deliver the best that evidence frankness, cleanness. The third option was this: stay with chronic secrecy, and then move powerfully and vigorously to shut up and shutdown those who stand up and cry: why the secrecy?

In each of the choices that the PPP/C Government and its leadership cabal faced, the decision was that secrecy best serves the ambitions and manipulations of those with a certain kind of governance in their minds. They had a special kind of feeling in their pockets. When pressed about the secrecies of his government, the record accumulated under his watch, the President insists that he is about transparency, and that it rules the day in Guyana. We pity the President, for the record of his government is his record, even if he means different and better, even if his own hands are unsullied by dark secrets and darker deeds. Aside from the usual politics, we think that the President has accounted well for himself, this time around.

What is not so appealing is the secrecy provision in the new proposed oil law that locks ExxonMobil’s expenses in a dungeon that is deeper, more tightly sealed than America’s Fort Knox, where the gold reserves are kept. When something as routine as oil project expenses are locked in secrecy as (to be) mandated by law, then that can never be to the benefit of Guyanese. What does ExxonMobil want to hide, and why would Mr. Alistair Routledge, the noble man that he is wants to hide expenses behind impenetrable veils of secrecy? Why would any Government of Guyana, any President, any leader in charge of this national patrimony, ever think up, dream up, and then send up such a provision in a proposed law to parliament for passage, for something as routine, but as costly as billions in expenses?

Guyanese have seen the same thing with the Oil Fund. We say it again: there is legal provision to deal with those who speak out about wrongdoing with the people’s money, but there is none for those who actually steal the money, mismanage the fund, and make themselves into multimillionaires. Why is there such a determination for secrecy that potential whistleblowers are given advance warning: hold peace, don’t say a word about what is seen, known about malfeasances with money from the oil patrimony? There can be no good intentions when things like these come from a government, when a president sees nothing about which he should be concerned.

Even before the PPP/C Government’s protective arrangements embedded in the Oil Fund, there was secrecy with the disposition (giveaways) of two oil blocks. Yet, the government had the brass face to defend what happened by saying that no law was broken. When the provisions that would protect citizens, or expose elected scoundrels, are left out of laws, then such bald-faced claims can be casually made. Now, the proposed new law leaves the disposition of precious oil blocks in ministerial hands, and something about cabinet oversight, as if that gives any comfort. What selection process would be used to award oil blocks? Who would be the recipients coming out high and handsome, and who too in the PPP/C Government likely behind them?

When potential investors from all around the world look at how government and leaders set things up, with secrecy and other loopholes, they are overjoyed. For they believe that they can do business with Guyanese politicians under the name of investment, and everybody would be happy. They salivate when the expenses they can claim are hidden from the people who have to pay them, Guyanese. Secrecy built into our oil laws makes such possibilities enticing and irresistible. At the end of it all, the Guyanese people, owners and shareholders of the nation wealth lose, and lose big. Secrecy is a barefaced government holdup, secrecy is now a PPP/C Government specialty, secrecy is a PPP/C regime weakness and sickness.

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Editorial, ExxonMobil, Government, office, status

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