Oil on the campaign trail

Aug 12, 2025 Editorial, Features / Columnists

Kaieteur News – As the election campaign unfolds, one might expect that the nation’s most lucrative resource, oil would command a central place in political debate. Yet across the speeches, manifestos, and debates, there is a strange, calculated quiet. The issue of how we regulate, tax, and manage our oil industry seems to have been placed in a political quarantine.

Oil is the lifeblood of our economy, but it is also the seat of some of our deepest structural weaknesses. A crooked contract was signed in the shadows, with royalties set at a level that leave billions in value untapped, and a zero-taxation arrangement, which favours the oil corporations rather than the citizens who own the resource in the first place.

Guyana is no longer about promise; Guyana is the real thing through and through, and all because of oil, crude oil, fossil fuel gold. Oil that can be touched, its riches tasted, and there is a multibillion-barrel ocean of it. We, the Guyanese people, do not even have the faintest idea of how much more oil we have, though others may be already privy to that information that also belongs to us. The search for the Golden Fleece and El Dorado can be finally stopped, for both are right here in Guyana. Guyana is the golden ticket, the most golden of tickets for Americans and Chinese, but not for the Guyanese people, to whom this great treasure chest of wealth belongs.

The shareholders of ExxonMobil and now Chevron Corporations are enriched by the delightful news of how sweet and cheap the oil from Guyana is, and how rich the dividends now in store for them. But of the people whose golden ticket has been snatched in the trickiest manner, there are no rich dividends, only the usual disappointments that leave them licking their sores. Their impoverishing plight is so overpowering that even their saliva dries up. The people in America who own pieces of paper prosper, while the Guyanese people who own the rich product punish. The top people at ExxonMobil have helped themselves to massive pay increases, and unbelievable multimillion American dollar bonuses, from Guyana’s golden oil ticket. Meanwhile almost half in Guyana’s population struggles to get by with US$5.50 a day. ExxonMobil and the others get the golden ticket from Guyana’s oil, Guyanese get a coffin made of sand and straw in which they bury their dreams, the prosperity that is due to all of them.

When the nation’s oil wealth is poorly managed, it is not the oil companies who feel the pinch, it is the people, through underfunded schools, decaying infrastructure, and limited public services. This is not merely an economic question; it is a moral one. Any government, regardless of ideology, has an obligation to ensure that national resources benefit the nation above all else. Stronger regulation, transparent contract management, fair royalty rates, and a tax regime that compels companies to pay their true share are not radical ideas. They are basic, responsible governance.

Yet, in this campaign, both ruling and opposition parties seem unwilling to address it. Why? The answer likely lies in the uncomfortable intersection of political donations, lobbying, and the entrenched power of the oil industry. Speaking plainly about changes to the contract risks alienating deep-pocketed allies and upsetting a delicate status quo that has served the few far better than the many.

But Guyanese voters should not accept this silence. Every candidate should be made to answer in clear, public terms whether they will champion reforms that protect the nation’s interest, or whether they will continue to turn a blind eye while our resources are siphoned off under sweetheart deals. If we cannot have a full, honest conversation about oil during an election, the one time, politicians are most accountable to the people, then when will we? The real danger is not that the oil companies will exploit our silence. It is that our political leaders will.

Discover more from Kaieteur News

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

debates, Editorial, Elections, Manifestos, oil

Latest News