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Vickram Bharrat from absentee minister to hallucinator

Aug 21, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Minister Vickram Bharrat is in awe to Bharrat Jagdeo, owes his political existence to the vice president.  He has no choice but to parrot what makes no sense to reasonable men and women, which imitates the standards that the vice president has made his personal brand.

It is unfortunate, part of the continuing disaster of Guyana that the Minister of Natural Resources could say with a serious face that, “from a neutral point of view we would see that Guyana’s oil and gas sector is one of the better managed oil and gas sector in the world.”  Minister Bharrat knows better, knows what is closer to the full truth of Guyana’s oil and gas sector, but he is so much at the beck and call of political considerations that he is unashamed to deliver what falls foul of the facts. It is cringeworthy, for what the minister said is best described as bordering close to insipidity.  We start with Minister Bharrat himself to lay some simple points before Guyanese, the world.

Minister Bharrat collides head-on with this truth: he has been silent; he has been missing for most of the last four years.  The world has been inspired to the point of fevered excitement with Guyana’s oil and gas developments, as announced by ExxonMobil, and he has been nowhere in sight.  When Guyanese look to him (the subject minister) he has been a phantom.  When citizens look for, hope for, an update or two, a few encouraging words founded on facts, the minister has been like a tomb: hollow, quiet, unbreathing.  Perhaps that is what meets the definition of Minister Bharrat for one of the better managed oil and gas sectors in the world.

The second clash with the minister’s brazen and comical claim about “one of the better managed” is that almost impenetrable secrecy has been the norm around oil and gas developments.  But Minister Bharrat is bold-faced, even two-faced enough, to speak with a straight face about “transparency” in this the most crucial of Guyanese economic sectors.  War has been declared against transparency in Guyana’s oil and gas sector, with abundant secrets being the PPPC Government’s dominant culture, but Minister Bharrat has the audacity to pretend that there is transparency.

Has the minister lost it?  Does he live in the real world or, like President Ali, has taken up full-time residence in some fantasy land of his own creation?  The true level of proven (and known) total current oil reserves has been degraded by his ministry and his chief policymaker in the oil and gas sector to a game of guesstimates, but the sector is “one of the better managed.”  Likewise, billions in project expenses are hidden, full audit reports are kept from the public, but the sector is “one of the better managed” in the world.

Most glaring of all, and this is a judgment call, there is the heavily marketed Wales Gas-to-Energy project about which Guyanese know three things only.  It costs US$2B (the most expensive local one to date), it is a web of tricky schemes (Jagdeo’s footprint), and it has been plagued by secrets (supporting documents concealed).  It could be that in the world that Minister Bharrat operates, secrets and schemes are part of the prevailing state of mind.  As Guyanese now know from hard experience, secrets and schemes are also compulsory components in the management practices of a government fanatically committed to such a self-serving, if not self-enriching, environment.  Minister Bharrat may have earned himself a unique honor: he is the only one who believes that this country’s oil and gas sector is “one of the better managed” globally.  Seeing that the minister has grown into a clever politician, there is the probability that he himself may not believe what he said about “one of the better managed.”  It was what he was ordered to do, what the situation to be glossed over called for, so he just did it, while hoping for the best. Guyana loses billions annually from no taxes, no ringfencing, and no independent oversight, yet it is “one of better managed” anywhere. Clearly, Minister Bharrat is now a victim of his own hallucinations and those of Bharrat Jagdeo also.

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