People everywhere just gotta be free

Mar 20, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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H@rd Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – The year was 1968 and it was Felix Cavaliere and the Rascals who made a chartbuster of “People got to be free.”  It is now 56 years later, and I never would have expected that a humorless and joyless character like Bharrat Jagdeo would his musical gyrations of ‘People everywhere, just wanna be free…Peace in the valley, people got to be free’. It is unbelievable that Jagdeo could come up with, yet another oil rabbit pulled out of his now old, familiar, and greasy hat. He must have an endless supply of these white rabbits.

Yeah, it is déjà vu, and Tom Jones comes to mind: ‘funny, familiar, forgotten feeling….’ as Jagdeo keeps walking all over the minds of locals, who allow him to do so.  Not I, sire.  Not I. Get a hold of this: Jagdeo’s new baby rabbit is about skilled Guyanese workers free to run from government pay to the pay of foreign companies.  I am beginning to appreciate those wrinkles in the Guyana Revenue Authority’s Godfrey Statia’s face, and the grey in his head too.  A prisoner of Camp Street (English for Chillon), he is.  It was my dirty and desultory duty to delve into the chief policymaker’s delivery in his last press conference to gather the full import of what he was sharing with Guyanese.  Guyana trains Guyanese so that the foreign corporate contingent in the local metropolis (Exxon’s Routledge said it is not a “frontier” anymore) can gobble them up.  Meanwhile, Guyana gets the heebie-jeebieson how to start over from scratch and replace them.  This is so that the domestic revolving door can continue to spin, and that the human traffic would flow uninterrupted.  If I didn’t know better, I would say that this oil business and the business of training and freeing up Guyanese workers could be compared to what used to be called a house of ill-repute.  People just coming and going.  What is the PPP Government operating a turnstile?

Mr. (sorry Dr.) Jagdeo was proud to relay to the Guyanese people that some workers are not locked into a contract.  Guyanese tax dollars are paying to educate and enhance our citizens.  Only for them, in turn, to be picked off at will by the likes of Exxon and its small army of American and European multinationals, conglomerates, and other assorted adventurers in what is now Guyana’s Wild West.  Of course, they pay handsomely.  There is nothing that compares locally.  Of course, this is to the diminishment of Guyana’s already scanty cupboard of people with skills, with the required patriotic eyesight and mentality. How does a policymaker of the caliber of a Bharrat Jagdeo stand idly by, preside over this insipidity (thought of insanity, but courtesy carried the day), and let a practice like this continue unchecked?  Even a political juvenile delinquent would have done better, found some barriers to halt the exodus of workers. Expensive workers.  Talented and proven workers.  Did somebody say that this fella Jagdeo is a genius? If Bharratji is a genius, then I am the genie that puts them together.

There was a time when Guyanese students sent to study abroad used to abscond and breach the terms of their executed scholarship contract.  Some disappeared altogether, the rotters.  Others tried to pay back the value attached to their scholarship, to be released from their post-study work obligations. No way, they had to stay and give their day (five years usually).  From his own words, my conclusion is that the chief policymaker of Guyana just abolished the Public Service Ministry.  I am thinking of rejoining the workforce.  Being not one given to braggadocio, like another national leader, I am positive that I can outwork and outmatch over 99% of Guyana’s working stiffs.

From an oilman’s perspective, such as Mr. Routledge, Guyana is pure heaven, the perfect oil paradise.  The oil projects in operation today cannot be monitored by locals because there is neither quantity nor quality available.  But Jagdeo is ready to approve new projects.  Everyone-Jagdeo, Routledge, Hess, and Wirth-know that Guyana is severely constrained by human capacity bottlenecks. Still, the nation’s chief policymaker (chief jester?) does nothing to stem the tide of joyful workers leaving government employment.  Why not slowdown project approvals, allow the time needed for capacity building and growing the bench.  Even on mighty Wall Street, where annual income for the heavyweight companies have ranged up to ten times more than Guyana gets from oil, skilled workers are tied up in ironclad long-term contracts.  Whenever these corporate heavyweights invest in the training of a worker that is thought of as a ‘keeper’, one held as a producer and contributor, then they are chained to those companies for years.  The company has first dibs to counter any outside offers.

Here are two closing thoughts.  Jagdeo can handpick people and place them on public commissions for a million smackeroos a month, plus allowances, for window dressing and part-time duty.  He should be able to go higher for people at the GRA and elsewhere and empower Statia to hold onto them. Ministers who are dumber than a dumbbell should not have a compensation package that pays them more per month than Guyanese who have real qualifications, real skills. and do real work.

(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.)

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• Bharrat Jagdeo, Felix Cavaliere, GHK Lall, H@rd Truths, Rascals

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