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Petroleum Commission not needed

Feb 16, 2025 Editorial, News

Editorial…

Kaieteur News- Bharrat Jagdeo, Guyana’s chief oil minister is like a clock on the issue of a Petroleum Commission.  His pendulum swings to one side, then travels to the opposite end.  It is a national disaster for Guyanese, when their most senior oil leader becomes a yo-yo relative to a Petroleum Commission.  First, it was coming, now it is not needed.  A pendulum, or a yo-yo, (or treachery in action), Guyanese get to make the call.

In the early days of the PPPC Government, Jagdeo’s position was that a Petroleum Commission would be in existence within “six months.”  In early 2021, citizens got the good news from Jagdeo.  The attorney general’s chambers, the office of the chief parliamentary counsel, and the Ministry of Natural Resources, were all busy putting the final touches on the Petroleum Commission that left Guyanese expecting its early unveiling.  Both country and people are still waiting four years later.  It is Jagdeo at his super best, with a carrot dangled in one hand, while he holds a cutlass in the other.  The carrot is to make Guyanese think positively (a Petroleum Commission is imminent), while the cutlass is to broadside those citizens who get out of line and ask where is the oil oversight group?  The nation’s most seasoned political leader has somehow convinced himself that he is Guyana’s first and only oil authority.  He has played these games so long and has been allowed to have his way with them, that he believes this time with oil will follow the same, old pattern.  Not if we at this publication have anything to say about it, meaning, over our dead bodies.

It is becoming more and more obvious that managing the nation’s oil wealth, in the slick manner that he has, has taken a toll on Jagdeo.  The more noise he makes, the more lacking in sense he appears.  The vitality of life has been sucked out of him, leaving him to come up with the pathetic.  “So, and the Petroleum Commission is, I dealt with that 100 times before, the Petroleum Commission, I dealt with it 100 times before I don’t even need to deal with it again.”  Study that sentence, and note how his words are garbled, (“So and the Petroleum Commission, is…), and his position suffers from a key missing ingredient.  It is accuracy, because Jagdeo has not addressed the need for a Petroleum Commission presence even 10 times, much less the “100 times” that he made up to mislead Guyanese.  Why was he all for such an oversight entity before, but see no wisdom in having one now?

His new posture is that “there is no magic with a Petroleum Commission.  There is no magic, we have given our agencies the tools to manage the sector.”  Which agencies, and what tools, are the questions we put before Jagdeo.  His new brain wave first revealed to the public in August 2024 is not pitiful, it is perverse.  At different times, Jagdeo himself has said, and President Ali has said, that Guyana is terribly lacking in capacity, and it is an uphill challenge to resolve in the short term.  The question that belongs in this context is where did he get the human resource tools, the technology tools, and a core of proven oil industry tools so swiftly that agencies have been beefed up in multiple areas of deficiency?  Did Jagdeo’s mystery tools, probably imaginary ones, spring into life, like a thief in the night (just as was the case with his glaringly deficient Natural Resource Fund law)?  With a leader as cunning as Jagdeo, one never knows, which his own record proves.

Whether there are oil agencies with a full complement of needed tools, there is still a hole in Guyana’s slippery oilman’s posture.  The agencies and the tools and the people using them still report to a minister, who report to the Cabinet.  Those agencies and their people owe their existence to the government, and can be swiftly muzzled, terminated.  A Petroleum Commission that is independent, credible, and with experts who know themselves would not be under the total control of Jagdeo.  Hence, his new resistance to it, because his music would stop playing.

(Petroleum Commission not needed)

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