Exxon is a slavemaster

Aug 08, 2023 News, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall…

Kaieteur News – Some Guyanese delightedly take Exxon’s side, give testimonial: the company is not a slavemaster.  No, sirree, sir!  I humbly, respectfully, sincerely, beg to differ.  Exxon is a modern-day slavemaster with the barbarities inflicted on every single Guyanese, including endorsers, marketers, leaders, and other defenders of this American monstrosity.  Unlike that great American Manichean, George W. Bush, I refrain from declaring the company a resident evil in Guyana.

In sharing, four things are emphasized.  This space will never be used to vilify fellow Guyanese; disagree, maybe, but smear, never.  Second, this is not an engagement, only a citizen’s conviction, statement.  Third, a tetanus shot was taken considering the toxic environment. Fourth, this is not about what other people think, it is what I think, what the reality is.  I live here. Observe. Now, to business pending.

For starters, 1%, then 2%, royalty for our light, sweet, super crude oil are reminiscent of the bells, whistles, mirrors, colored strings, and shiny trinkets that African traitors were given to sell the prime manhood and womanhood of their continent into lifelong bondage.  Summary: incredible domestic cheapness for stupendous external richness.  Two percent is slavery, and Exxon owns it.  Translation: slave master. Note parallels: Exxon is the East India Company, and it has captive Guyanese slave labor working for its interests ranging from parliament to Freedom House to Congress Place.  Anybody study our political people, really study them sniffing the air and pawing the ground, when oil is the subject?  Who is master, and who is serf/slave?

Second, the new Father of Guyana, Mr. Alistair Routledge, looks down his nose at his restless Guyanese minions, and reassure them that the Exxon contract is the best thing that ever happened to Guyana, viz., revenue stream.  Thinking of that statement, I recall an eerie precedent to Massa Routledge’s dripping, paternalistic, barely concealed, condescension.  ‘It sounds like this: look at the slaves, look how happy and contented they are.  They have never had it so good; it is certainly better than what they had in the dark, savage heart of Africa.’  Exxon first tricked Guyanese, and then turned around and kicked them with that insult.  Most Guyanese can count past 2% and some denounce that billion-dollar bonanza masquerading as secret expenses.  Why secrecy?

Why my brothers, my protectors, my advocates, Dr. Ali and Dr, Jagdeo, reject disclosing the details of Exxon’s billions in oil expenses?  I resurrect still another barbaric aspect in slave masters’ behavior in the slave aristocracy of the American South. No to learning, no to education, no to exposure, for the slaves.  For then they would get ideas about freedom.  Similarly, it is no to expenses disclosures, for there would be freedom to detect possible skullduggeries buried in these bills for oil exploration, production, transportation, other likely billion-dollar fabrications. Why hide if nothing to slide past locals?  Though sealed, info sneaks out via watchdog studies about corporate banditries that proliferate.  Oil companies are not missionaries; Exxon has been conspicuously among mercenaries.  Are Exxon’s markups so huge, its ‘mistakes’ so many?  I reintroduce contemporaries to another slavemaster practice: keep them dumb, give them rum, and leave them numb.  Dumb and numb to the predations; the ones of today may not be sexual, but probably expense violations and ravages.

Fourth, when Exxon says No! No! No! to renegotiation of this odious Guyanese institution called the 2016 Exxon-Guyana oil contract, remember what happened in civilized UK, and the good ole USA. Pressure and pleas to free and release the shacked slaves met with resistance, rancidness, and rage.  No to renegotiation is tantamount to what was said when the sacred rights of man were vested in words like abolition and emancipation.  No to renegotiation is Exxon slavemasters drawing their line in sand, and saying no the emancipation of Guyana today.  Continue, and there will be a time when that line turns carmine.

This is neither theory nor philosophy; this is Guyanese reality.  This is not logic inspired by proposition; this is the savagery of Guyana’s condition, a statement of local economic fact.  This is not hypothesis about 21^st century slavemasters, this is the state of crisis brought about by the callous, even cruel, inhumanity of Exxon and its buccaneers in Guyana.  When Mr. Darren Woods can transform into William Wilberforce (emancipation through renegotiation), then I would drop the company’s slavemaster label, slur, denigration.  Because Mr. Routledge is the face, voice, and manipulative engine of the company here, then he has to hear it, taste it, and live with it.  The best work he can do for Exxon is to absorb the growing disgust and rage of Guyanese at Exxon, and take it back wholesale to Texas.

The Exxon contract is enslaving.  The language, body language, and unspoken language of Exxon are those of slavemasters.  Practices and profits match. Meanwhile, impoverished high-income people are still chained to slavery. Poverty is slavery.  The prostrations of national leaders confirm their captivity.  So, when they avert eyes and kneel, who is boss, who is bozo?One last time, who is slavemaster and who is slave?  Somebody is trying to make a damn fool of Guyanese.

 

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• Dr. Ali and Dr, Jagdeo, ourth, slavemaster, when Exxon

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