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Anomaly – a new one
Editorial…
(Kaieteur News) – It amazes the lengths to which this government goes to deny important matters. When it is unable to deny, it deflects. However, when efforts at deflecting come to naught, it is time for minimisation to takeover. So, in the context of their great national oil patrimony, citizens hear a curious word, one intended to banish fears, to put them at ease. The word used by the government is “anomaly” and then “a slight anomaly” only. There is clear evidence of water bubbling directly above the ExxonMobil gas pipeline’s path, and citizens are left to contend with “a slight anomaly.” We are happy that the government did not think of insulting the people by releasing a statement confirming that the bubbling water in that gas pipeline area was the result of fish performing their versions of aquatic sports.
An anomaly is something out of the ordinary. So remote and irregular as to be nothing to worry about. To emphasise that it is much ado about nothing, two government agencies informed the public that it was not just an anomaly, and then only a slight one. So small and so meaningless as to mean nothing. When governments go to these lengths, with not one, but two state agencies delivering a very terse message, it is usually confirmation that there is something. Minister of Natural Resources, Vickram Bharrat, had a slip of the tongue. Only a slip, not a slide. At the inception, he denied and dismissed a report about a problem around the ExxonMobil gas pipeline. It was left to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Maritime Administration Department (MARAD) to rush out and try to plaster over that discrepancy. That move, delegation to two agencies, in itself was instructive.
Instructive because the Wales Gas-to-Energy project falls within the portfolio of the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM). For reasons known only inside the circle of government, OPM took itself out of the loop, and left the holding and dealing with that hotcake (bubbling water above the pipeline) to the EPA and MARAD. Apparently, nobody in the PPP/C government wanted to touch it. Natural Resources Minister Bharrat was the first who stepped sideways, when he should have had a say, made it his duty to be in the know. What does that patch of bubbling water above the pipeline mean? Does it represent a warning sign, some lurking danger? Or, is it as the EPA and MARAD asserted “a slight anomaly?” When governments start to fish around and pass around what has to be gotten on top of immediately, they giveaway themselves.
Relative to Guyana, the first giveaway is how much the PPP/C government is first about putting up a defensive shield around anything that has to do with the interests of ExxonMobil. Anything that could lead to embarrassment for the American oil giant has to be nipped in the bud, dismissed as worrying over nothing. The Government of Guyana needed to be supersensitive to any suspicious, mysterious, bubble, anything that looks out of place. Yet there were two government institutions talking from both sides of their mouths. On one side, the EPA and MARAD could attest “unequivocally that there is no factual basis” for concerns about a ruptured pipeline. But, from the other side, both agencies could admit that there is “a slight anomaly.”
What did the EPA and MARAD do to arrive at those conclusions, one “unequivocal”, the other “slight?” From where did the two agencies obtain the basis for their release, infuse them with that confidence? We at this publication hope that the information (facts) supporting their posture did not originate from ExxonMobil. It should not require Guyana’s Leader of the Opposition to be so keen of eye, so committed to national priorities, that he is the one spilling the news about water bubbling directly above the ExxonMobil gas pipeline. The government has to be the first one on the job. Government must be the first source of developments having some relationship to the oil and gas sector. The fact that the pipeline is inactive is irrelevant.
Because the PPP/C government is so protective of ExxonMobil, citizens worry about what is hidden from them, what they should fear.
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