We must stem invasion of foreign-owned companies who hijack our oil-related business

Dear Editor,

All Guyanese capable of some level of thought should be asking themselves whether we are the most naive and gullible people in the world. We have found the mother-load of oil reserves; enough to transform our economy; enough to eradicate our deep poverty; enough to safeguard our children’s future; enough to make any oil company salivate and line up from here to China for a piece of the proverbial cake. Yet, amazingly we feel that we have no chips with which to renegotiate the most scandalous oil deals signed perhaps in the history of the signing of oil deals. Oil contracts, which virtually every independent expert, global academia, and every internet search far and wide have found to be incomparably unfair; whether from the pathetic signing bonus; the miniscule royalty; or the horrendous profit-sharing agreement, sans ring-fencing.

We should ask ourselves whether we are the most foolish people in the world; to allow our politicians, hell-bent on promoting themselves as the wise stewards of our nation that they are not, to squander the best thing that ever happened to us economically in our brief history. The same politicians who decided to arrogate onto themselves the competence to negotiate world-level oil deals, without the wisdom to arm themselves with the best independent oil negotiators in the world. The same politicians who, not wanting to ‘look bad’ could not even eat a slice of humble pie big enough to ensure Guyana’s future; who have sheepishly and foolishly allowed the situation to perpetuate the risk of our economic demise. Politicians, and their cronies in public places, who allow our new oil company puppet masters and their diplomatic friends to play us with pittances of community work, wining and dining of our decision-makers, dividing and ruling, and lobbying.

We must ask ourselves whether we shall allow these same politicians to drag our Implicit Bias (look it up) and tribalism, out from the shameful primeval recesses of our minds where they rightfully belong, to where they overwhelm our love, altruism, intelligence and rationality, so that they may garner votes. Will we allow them to squander our most promising economic opportunity; to pit us

against ourselves in an electoral battlefield where the eventual winner takes all; all of the impending economic vacuum and political wasteland?

We must ask ourselves, why our sheepishness? Have we been battered into a such a national stupor that we do not have the collective gumption to call a spade a spade; to say enough is enough; to demand of our representatives that, regardless of which side of this pathetic political divide they sit, they must rise up, be brave, accept that we have messed up the deals so far; and take up the mountain of bargaining chips that we now hold, to get the best negotiators, and renegotiate?

Why hasn’t every citizen with enough bandwidth to Google the words, “Local Content” not yet climbed the Shakespearean walls, battlements and towers, with their babies in their arms and shouted at them so loud that even the mighty Atlantic should shake as it echoed? For the Google search would have revealed that virtually every single developing country to have discovered oil has insisted in their Local Content framework, that oil-related business must go to indigenously-owned and controlled entities.

Tanzania, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Ghana, Angola, Sierra Leone, even our own CARICOM neighbour, Trinidad and Tobago, (to name a few) all literally require that Local Content business must be directed to companies owned in the majority (over 51%) by nationals of their country, and to whom the economic benefits of the business must flow. Irrespective of the oil revenues to the government coffers, such a model would ensure that Guyanese businesses can have value added, immediately. It matters not whether we currently possess the competencies and resources to do the business; it forces the foreign companies who have such resources to seek minority partnerships with Guyanese, to train them, to ensure the success of the local business, for their mutual gain, in a manner where Guyanese earn. And all this is nothing new. They have come running. We must stem the invasion of foreignowned businesses who hijack our local content business, with some tenuous Guyanese front, while laughing at us all the way to the bank. We can do so with a robust Local Content policy, which incidentally, we need only replicate from the above-mentioned countries.

So, let us listen not to the scandalous mouthing off of the leading oil company that it has invested so heavily in Guyana’s businesses, while advertising a few handouts and even taxi bills as local content expenses. Let us quickly dispense with the disingenuous notion that Local Content legislation and policies would scare off investors – they never have; and certainly not with our reserves.

Do you know what scares off investors? Political instability. Yours faithfully, (Name and address supplied)