OPINION: This is where oil has brought Guyanese

Last Updated on Thursday, 9 January 2025, 23:40 by Writer

By GHK Lall

For decades Guyanese have been living with a crippling, haunting divide. Race. As if that’s not weakening enough, there is a new divider now. Renegotiation. From every indication, renegotiation has become as much of a brutalizing wedge issue as race. From the ethnic divide to the Exxon divide. How do already overburdened Guyanese rise to the challenge? They understand race: DNA deep, visible, memorable. However, most Guyanese don’t have enough of an understanding of oil in all its intricacies, nuances, delicacies, and barbarities. Men die over oil, from wars fought over it. Hot wars, cold wars, proxy wars. The latter two are growing in strength in Guyana. Though local understanding of the treasure in hand may be limited, there is knowledge of one vital reality: a few are getting and celebrating the fruits of oil; the majority are reaching and grasping and coming up with nothing. It’s the fuel of the new divide, part of the tragedy of this massive patrimony.

I am for renegotiation. The slander of being anti-Exxon and anti-PPP, anti-PNC, even anti-American, now seems almost inevitable. I am still for renegotiation—would be to my last breath. Does that make me a patriot? What about the Guyanese who are against renegotiation for whatever reason self-serving or noble? Does that make them antipatriotic and, in its worst iteration, traitors? The disagreement and gap can be vehement but must not reach to that level of toxic viciousness. Incidentally, what is patriotism and what is country in Guyana’s lush new context of oil? My conclusion is that those are ordinary conveniences, if not anachronisms. The focus has been on economics, the law, and good name. Rightly so, I believe, but on one condition only. All three must be two-way streets.

I think that Messrs. Woods and Routledge and the Exxon board have their own anxieties about reputational stains and simmering resentments heaving beneath forced civil calm locally. I further believe that, as is customary at such elevated levels, there is a money contingency at hand to work through current percentage and other differences. More simply put, I believe that if men like Woods and Routledge have a shade of the corporate wisdoms that I think they possess, there is an openness to making some concessions, however meager. The blockages come from local ruling sources, which has been my unshakeable sense since the word renegotiation started to gain strength, stir passions.

Recently, I read the startling. Venezuela and America. Not the two together and locked over Guyana, but the sources of the representation. The people in power are now saying what I repeatedly wrote in the public space 6-7 years ago. In sum, the 2% is detested, but is recognized as the insurance premium that must be paid, part of the one-sided bargain that was executed by the previous Coalition government. At different times, I used such terms as “blood money” and “protection money.” Back then, the PPP opposition mocked and scorned, dismissed outright the thought laid before all citizens. Today, Venezuela and America are inseparable from the PPP defensive narratives to rationalize not renegotiating.

Then the law has been summoned in the war against renegotiation. Contract law, the laws of economics, and the binding laws that give power to capitalism’s endeavors. For their own reasons, Guyana’s best and brightest give the shortest shrift to the laws of sovereignty and what renders the local Constitution all but nonexistent. Men who are innovative and pioneering in novel stratagems to the application of law (and life itself) are now curiously one-dimensional and lacking in energy and sagacity. Their reflexive is settled: No! No! to renegotiation. Can’t be done. Should not be tried. Too dangerous. Reeks of the self-defeating. Before one step has been taken, one thought completed, minds are made up, rest immovably.

This returns to those two ligaments of discussion, contention: Venezuela and patriotism. Stirring were the pronouncements about “Essequibo is ours.” Sez who? Who is going to be there on the frontlines, or any lines? Perhaps that has been outsourced to the Americans, as an unstated provision of the Exxon contract. Since I am in this defiant mode, Winston Churchill flashes across the brow. “We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds…” Do Guyanese think that they have something worth fighting for with their every facility? Who are Guyanese fighting? Once again, it is among themselves.

Review and renegotiation were anthem and mantra for the men who are now totally against both. What has brought about the change, this complete reversal of position? The trappings of power are what I conclude. The accession to or retention of power is a more powerful pull than pride, patriotic duty, and the welfare of the people. For the record, there is no compulsion to criticize or condemn any citizen anymore. What remains are the realities with which I foresee Guyanese must cope. There is a national flag and a national pledge, but the Exxon contract mocks both. There is a parliament that stands as a theater of the absurd due to the Exxon contract. A judicial “guarantee” could have been made or heard relative to an oil matter, and the weight of Exxon features heavily in whatever was said by whom and heard by Mr. John Hess, an Exxon partner. These may all appear to be peripheral to Exxon and oil, but anyone who thinks so is congratulated for being content with the role of an ostrich.

Finally, Guyana is either a country or it is an Exxon subsidiary. I think that the point is now moot as to which it is, no longer a matter of disagreement. To assert that Guyana is now an American satellite or outpost has so much going for it, as to no longer be deniable. The oil was long dreamt about, hoped for, and then it came in torrents. Now the best that Guyanese can do is to tear each other apart. For me, this whole ugliness surrounding renegotiation (or not to) and all that it represents is as painful as cancer and just as poignant. I have had dealings with that sickness; am better for it. If this is what oil has done to my times and peers, then there is really not much left for me to do, to give. It is the last great irony, the one development, one national resource, that held the grandeur of being the best thing ever for Guyanese has turned out to be the most divisive and destructive to date.