H@RD TRUTHS BY GHK LALL – The future will be full

Dec 01, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

Kaieteur News – Everybody who is somebody is telling hopeful Guyanese that (trust them) the future will be better. Guyana’s Vice President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, has planted this rose in the hearts of expectant Guyanese: be patient now, for later will be greater; revenues will be maximized, and citizens will reap the rewards of their present discipline, sacrifices, and belief in the PPP’s newest Bible. It points to the future. This is Dr. Jagdeo at his bedside best: take the bitter medicine (starving and suffering today) for maximum relief coming (pain free, stress free, poverty free tomorrow). Brother Barry is now a missionary proselytizing across Guyana with the verses of Exxon and Mr. Alistair Routledge. Regarding the Exxon Guyana hand, President Routledge, he came out recently and prioritized (guess what?) the future in store for Guyanese.

GHK LALL

I love these two lovely gentlemen, leaders of a rare stripe, one that even a zebra would hurry to shed in some dark corner when nobody is watching. For here is where they both are: Guyanese have good things coming to them. All they have to do is wait and hope and trust. I knew that Dr. Jagdeo was a politician of a certain unmentionable kind, and President Routledge a businessman that is not looked upon favourably all over. What I didn’t know was that both are now holy men peacocking around with this new dispensation of the years ahead will be loaded with dates and grapes. Guyanese are identified over and over as the richest people in the world today, but they are eating salt and rice today, and told today to wait for tomorrow. This is while the same people (Bharrat and Alistair), who are encouraging them to tighten their belts, and control their expectations, are feasting on venison and vintage wines. If either of the two is a vegan or a teetotaler, please accept my hastily tendered apology. If this is not a contradiction, then it is the rankest of rank hypocrisies from both.

Tomorrow could be five years from now, or never at all, depending upon oil prices, and new technology developments lagging. If I left out the insatiable greed and sprawling unscrupulousness of venal politicians and their comrades, chalk that up to the amnesia of advancing days. Today, I will go easy on my Guyanese brother and zero in on the American one. President Routledge knows that the tomorrow of lush promise about which he tells Guyanese doesn’t cut it for Exxon’s investors. Exxon does not deliver handsome returns now on a quarterly basis, and American, European, and other investors are calculating the odds, and making their bailout plans. For emphasis, it is why quarterly company earnings are such a closely watched event. Fail to meet expectations in one or two quarters is a warning sign, but Exxon Guyana man knows that pleading with big investors to wait for years (the future) is dead on arrival.

Portfolio managers have to produce results, or they lose money, and lose Investors. Pension fund managers and hedge fund managers have people to pay, and had better have capital gains and dividends to handout (not GY$25,000, a la Excellency Ali). None of these Exxon watchers and investors want to hear about the promise of the future, and profit maximization at a time that could turn out to be a mirage. Investors want returns now, as in today. The big players have returns on capital to consider, people to pay, and reputations to maintain, or surpass. Oh, another thing: they have analysts studying them like birds of prey and ready to pounce, should they lapse in performance. I recommend that President Routledge try to pull that rope-a-dope about tomorrow in America and see if he is not run straight to Siberia. As to why the different standard for poor, coloured Third World people, President Routledge has a lot to answer, but it is par for the course. It is more than the clash of contradiction; it is the double standard fostered by hypocrisy. Foreign investors in Guyana’s oil patrimony have to be enriched now, while the domestic owners of the same wealth have to tighten their bellies and depend on some distant tomorrow. I congratulate President Routledge for getting former president Jagdeo to go along with his jive talk about seasons of prosperity waiting in the future for poor, passive, and patient Guyanese.

Reflecting on this, Dr. Jagdeo should extend his customary information blackout on things oil and gas, and put a halt to all those glittering announcements about how great Guyana is, and how good Guyanese have it. Why torture the poor and needy and expectant by dangling all these beauties about GDP, and economy, and prosperity, when Guyanese remain empty-handed, hollow-eyed, slack-jawed, and stomach-deprived? I implore Presidents Jagdeo and Routledge (not necessarily in that order) to cease the pantomime of trying to dance in cement shoes. The former should stick to politics and its flights of the fanciful, while the latter should limit himself to commerce, given how well it has done for him. Leave evangelizing about the future and the heaven waiting for Guyanese to the truly clean hearted.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)