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Jagdeo’s new PSA

Oct 05, 2024 Editorial

Editorial…

Kaieteur News – Make the mistake of asking Vice President Jagdeo about his new Production Sharing Agreement (PSA), and the floodgates open with a flurry of words.  The new PSA is Jagdeo’s baby that he loves displaying before the world.  In doing so, he gets to ‘big up’ himself and beat to a pulp the former APNU+AFC Coalition for its unpardonable failures with the 2016 PSA that it signed with ExxonMobil handcuffing Guyana for decades.  The Coalition deserves every blow it gets, for there are few actions by a government that can compare. Guyanese pay bitter prices for that group’s egregious lapses in judgment.  When Jagdeo ‘bigs’ himself up, however, with his PSA, he doesn’t do as well.  No doubt, he markets the new PSA well, and there are few better than the PPP/C Government’s marketing machinery when it is operating in top gear.  Marketing and reality are two different things, and they are often at odds, leaving those doing the marketing looking pathetic.  It is not what Jagdeo sells about his PSA that reduces him to the pitiful, it is what he does not do with it that leaves him looking like a hollow leadership shadow.

We applaud the 10% royalty and 10% in taxes, with as much shared for the 65% cost recovery provision, among other features in the new PSA.  We look on in disbelief, with a shudder, as Jagdeo is unmoving: the new PSA does not and will not apply to the rich Stabroek Block.  Has Guyana’s chief policymaker lost hold of his senses?  Why is he so consumed with prostrating himself to the wishes of ExxonMobil, even when it makes him look a very sorry figure?  To have a new PSA and not use it for its maximum potential is more than a major leadership blunder, it is tantamount to being among the costliest of white-collar crimes.  Jagdeo knows that the Stabroek Block is where the oil is, and that is where his new PSA could produce the best results for Guyana.  Yet he ducks from doing what is necessary to get more out the nation’s oil patrimony for Guyanese.  What the chief oil policymaker is selling about the new PSA is good for low propaganda purposes.  But it is of no use to Guyanese who are starving and harbour high hopes of cashing in on their oil bonanza.

We study what this so-called policymaker has done with the new PSA and think of a man who has a winning lottery ticket with massive millions as his prize.  He talks about it to anyone who would listen.  He flashes the ticket in front of the eyes of anybody he could get to look.  But having done that, he then takes that huge winning ticket and parks it in a corner that provides no benefit to his family.  When Jagdeo is so resistant to applying all new PSA to the Stabroek Block he makes himself look small and of no consequence, if not irrelevant.  Which leader would craft a new PSA and then be selective about what it should apply to and what is exempt from its terms and conditions?  What is the hold, we ask, that ExxonMobil has over him that he doesn’t care how his fear of acting shows?  In what way has ExxonMobil brainwashed him, or weakened him, that there is this grim refusal to extend the power of the new PSA by his own hands to the Stabroek Block?  The Stabroek Block, the great oil discovery of the 21st century, is where the big oil reservoirs are.  Ten percent royalties and ten percent taxes on its billions of proven reserves are what would put Guyana in its rightful place.  That is, on the same level as the rich oil producing countries of the world.  When he makes not moving with the new PSA on the Stabroek Block his standard that can never be policy that has anything to recommend it.  It is a perversity that is a rank injustice to all Guyanese, including the unborn ones.  The new PSA is Jagdeo’s baby.  It has turned out to be Guyana’s blight when its reach is stunted by Jagdeo and its benefits squandered by Guyana’s chief policymaker.

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