Blessing or curse, or curse disguised as blessing

Apr 05, 2024 Features / Columnists, Oil & Gas

H@rd Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – A small storm has boiled here with that New York Times headline about Guyana’s oil wealth. We must thank Frederick Collins et al for their energy and devotion to this national cause. Is it a lost cause, even as these first baby steps are made into the new world of oil? So much to know, so much pushed ahead with, despite not knowing, not having the capabilities to stand tight guard over the treasure.

GHK Lall

Though I have lost track of how often and where the exact same visions of blessing or curse have been shared, it is worthwhile to continue exploring which one it is: blessing or curse.

Billions of barrels of a well-priced commodity that the world needs have every element that make them a blessing. So many doors could be opened, so many elusive possibilities more palpable, with that distinctive feeling of drawing closer to hand. How can that not be a blessing by even the most rigorous of measurements, any fair judgment? With the added blessing of a small population, the blessing can be spread across all, with some still left over, with honest husbandry. Honest husbandry and prudent midwifery. This is where the first traces, the first shadows, of Guyana’s perpetual curse lengthen, deepen, and sicken.

Whither honorable husbandry of this greatest, most promising of national assets? Management, it is. Leadership comes into play. On each of those counts-husbandry, management, leadership-this has been the cancer in the gut, the toxin in the blood, that bends this country double. The people, apart from the few, groan with much pain. Why, when there is this underwater storehouse that could make such a great difference? The answer is simple: put profligates in charge of huge lottery winnings and before long penury rushes to the doorstep. Put cowards at the helm and battle lines collapse. Put the corrupt close by and the promise of blessings evaporate. Is this not what has happened with this oil blessing now souring, increasingly embittering? Now try chewing on this. Those who never knew that a word like honor exists, suddenly makes that their breastplate. When that surfaces, Guyanese began their long, slow descent to the inevitable drowning awaiting. Not only principle and promise are distorted, but there is also the dissipation of trust, the death of hope. And with the fall of those, there begins the exhuming of all the tribal and racial and social memories that never let Guyanese go. Go forward. Go up. Go somewhere other than where they have been.

Oil is the passport and entry visa to the blessings of the Promised Land that is increasingly and undeniably a mirage. At least, there could be, and should have been, blessings already to some agreeable degree. Well, what and where are those blessings? Stone monuments? Great glass towers? Long stretches of sand held in tight embrace by cement and asphalt? Some may laud those as among the miracles facilitated by the national patrimony; countless others behold mausoleums to hold them right where they are. At the bottom of the stairway that is neither inviting nor climbable. In the economic dungeons to languish in naked hunger about what should have been but isn’t. When products take precedence over people, and which are beyond their reach, the talk of oil blessings starts to get lost among the thickening clouds. Will this oil ever mean something? Can those elected ever be trusted to be honest at rock-bottom minimum? Will they ever fight for Guyanese? Or will their most potent energies (and passions) be harnessed to fight Guyanese? I should not have to identify what is what and who has been what way in this country since the arrival of oil.

What an arrival it was! Hailed with fanfare, the long-awaited blessing finally appearing. More and more, my conclusion is that it has a fiendishly apocalyptic face. Ever examine our leaders in any sector? If among them are not the gods of cunning and addictive plundering, then Guyanese who still believe in the local cornucopia of blessings are worse off than they know. It is harrowing enough to consider the current crop of players and their chronic deviousness. It is unimaginable to think of those who lurk in the wings, and harbor even more destructive ambitions and calculations about the blessings that this oil wealth encompasses. For themselves first and above all, to be bluntly pointed.

For sure, the oil itself represents the luster of a wondrous blessing. It is in the uncapping if it, the putting of national arms around it, and the sharing of it that the curses fight for freedom to ravage Guyanese. Study the attitudes and actions of Guyana’s oil trustees, and when they can talk straight, walk straight, and be straight with this gargantuan oil inheritance, then it would be the time for a real national celebration. The blessing of full participation. The joy of a credible leadership character, condition. Oil has its own character: viscous, sulfurous, and dangerous, too. Nigeria and Iraq have lived with all three. Venezuelans and Trinidadians know this too: all that is dangerous in oil is pushed beyond the outer limits, when barbarous leaders stand over it. Guyanese in bigger and broader clumps are now coming to grips with this indigestible knowledge.

As circumstances congregate, as the unacceptable flows from the insupportable with this oil, the issue and inquiry remain and stare in the face. They are neither thinning out nor fading away. Blessing or curse, what is this oil of Guyana? I will make this tough call. Blessings, maybe. Curse, definitely; the surest of bets. Guyana is well on its way with the curse. Check out those who surround it, control it, and corrupt it.

(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.)

blessing, curse, Frederick Collins, GHK Lall, Guyana’s, H@rd Truths

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