Oil and Independence

May 27, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – It was the much-hailed American Founding Father, Patrick Henry, who is credited with those ringing, soaring words dedicated at the altar of freedom. “Give me liberty, or give me death,” certainly still retain most of its mystical, majestic grandeur, and all that those seven demanding, commanding words inspire.

On this, the 58th Anniversary of this country’s Independence from the bondage of colonialism, the grasping claims of surrogate motherhood, it is clear that Guyana got more than it can swallow. We choked with what we got when Independence came because when we tasted liberty, we began a slow death march, too. On May 26, 1966, Guyana separated from the yoke of imperial monarchy, the tyranny of the distant parliamentary, and we were delirious in celebrating something called Independence. It was supposed to have represented those elements that strike at the heart of the human spirit: the freedom to govern self, determine for self the national destiny. And attached to that, the timeless liberties, that have separated man into a special category of mammal.

Fifty-eight years on from that fateful May, we must have come somewhere as a place. Of that, there is some uncertainty in significant segments of Guyana, which gives the first clues of how we are as a people. For, it is as a people that we are still trying, struggling, gasping, to find our footing. To some degree (greater according to some, lesser as per others), the strange new lease on national life given to us by the arrival of the much hoped for Independence has contributed in no small way to the beginning of the death of us. We got liberty and we got death also.

Politics and leaders gone off the deep end, and the wrong way, have roasted Guyanese repeatedly over an open pit. Many escaped the tentacles of crippling leaders, evaded their self-destructions waged, by fleeing from this newfound freedom to other shores and starting over from scratch. The liberties enjoyed afforded us the luxury to engage in devastating, divisive frenzies that have never ceased. In fact, the case could be made that the passage of time has so scarred us that we are now worse than ever before.

The Independence of 1966 has since driven us into a state of madness. It is where national pride and individual dignity and group wisdom have all willingly rushed for the exits. There was not a pause, second thought, or first reflection that there could be some other way. We didn’t want to hear it before, and now with the potential perpetual financial freedom promised by the discovery of oil, we have totally lost our sense of hearing.

We claim to have independence of thought, freedom of conscience, but the products of both are still a mystery. Now that this black gold is here, the hope that some degree of sanity could take hold is all but abandoned. What used to be a dogfight before about power and the right to govern has now transformed into a blood feud over who is benefitting, and who is being marginalised, as in enslaved and cheated. Below the towering new structures, around the jam of endless machines, and all the glass and steel exteriors, this is the deathlike reality of a free Guyana, an oil rich land that just does not know what to do with itself. It is a society that doesn’t have the will (or wisdom) to wrap its arms around the promise and ideals embedded in Independence from a draining Mother Country. This is a country with a diverse group of people who are yet to come to grips with the magnitude of their oil blessing and their many natural resource gifts. When all of this is weighed, there is this great imbalance detected. The incomprehensible mathematical mystery that such a small number of people with such a great rich endowment doesn’t know what to do with themselves. That they could divide and divide again and there still would be much left over. Now, Independence looks like the worst gift we received, that is, until oil came, which could be the death of this free Guyana.

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