Exxon press conferences

Mar 25, 2024 Editorial, Features / Columnists

Editorial…

Kaieteur News – ExxonMobil can be counted on to hold what it calls press engagements. We at this publication thinks that engagement is fitting, given that Guyana is tied to the company in what has all the signs of a forced marriage. Like a marriage, Guyana is hitched to ExxonMobil for better or worse. Take the pulse of Guyanese left hanging and he or she will confirm that it has been for the worse. Nonetheless, ExxonMobil holds these so-called press engagements and presents a bright, smiling face to still hopeful locals about what this oil wealth could mean for them.

The press engagements have been nothing but fun for a handful of Guyanese, and an ordeal for the rest of Guyana. The few are those with an inside track to the oil money, while many are the ones discarded to crawl around, and peering about, for any loose change to which they can help themselves. This is what ExxonMobil calls the intricate balancing act of taking care of the ever-nervous investor class, but with an eye to some revenue stream for Guyanese. According to the company’s spokespeople, local and foreign, the oil money coming to Guyanese now is good but just wait a few more years and banks cannot handle the cash set to roll into this country. This is the pleasant side of ExxonMobil’s press engagements, with drumroll, eyeroll, and the rolling of fine Havana cigars to blow smoke into the eyes of locals. The revenue has been no more than a trickle.

Press engagements will not be press engagements worth the name if there was not the edgy to grace the occasion. Why is Guyana not getting more? Why is ExxonMobil grabbing almost all the profits (on the table, as well as those on the sly side) for itself? What would the world be if there was no space made to accommodate disagreeable people? From an ExxonMobil point of view, this paper has staked its claim to the top of the ladder as far as the disagreeable people in the press crowd are concerned. It has to come prepared to answer the same questions repeatedly because they have not been answered fully to date. Questions about its barbaric contract and more questions about what kind of practices occur with billions in expenses. Why do they have to be kept secret from the people paying them? What is so sacred about these expenses that must be hidden away from prying eyes, as though there are some religious artifacts? If it is not unamerican in America to seek value for money spent, then it should not be unamerican in Guyana to check on what the company is doing to verify that same value is being received. Though there is continuing debate about what constitutes being Guyanese, and the associated values, hiding expenses from the people who have paid for ringside seats certainly qualifies to be un-Guyanese. The people speaking for ExxonMobil should not spend their time at press engagements ducking from and dissembling over questions involving billions of American dollars. It is the same unacceptable story with how many new billions of barrels of oil ExxonMobil has discovered but hide from Guyanese.

The Guyanese people are due straight answers, and press engagements are the best forums for getting them. The straight answers that belong to this country’s citizens as a matter of right have not been provided by any of ExxonMobil’s spokespeople. Instead, Guyanese have had to be content with the circular, what seesaws and shifts them around, and what leaves them in deeper darkness. To be blunt, what ExxonMobil has put out as press engagements have come to represent nothing but American circuses, with its usual complement of a ringmaster, a juggler or two, and a set of men walking about on eggshells. A trillion-dollar oil patrimony should not come to this clownish state. The podium has become both a propaganda stage and an investor convention that is more focused on the calculations of ExxonMobil’s stakeholders.

In order that all Guyanese appreciate what they are getting with ExxonMobil’s press engagements, they must get this. The ExxonMobil press engagements are held weekly at Freedom House, with Guyana’s Bharrat Jagdeo as ExxonMobil’s chief spokesman.

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Bharrat Jagdeo, ExxonMobi, forced marriage, press conferences

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