…in local content
Your Eyewitness has seen the future…and it ain’t nice. For us Guyanese, that is. Last week, he forgot that the GIPEX oil and gas event organised by Raphael Trotman’s daughter was going on, so he ambled over to the Marriott to grab a quick bite for lunch. And as he entered – or TRIED to enter – the restaurant, for the first time in his life, he felt he was a stranger in a strange land. The place was overrun with foreigners…all speaking in tongues, but with an air and a swagger that insisted they owned the place!!
Eventually, my friends – an eclectic bunch of Guyanese – and I were shoehorned into one of the longer tables at which a French-sounding couple were finishing up their lunch. In our hearing, the fella said to the lady as he looked over to us like specimens in a zoo, “Vell, zey do get together sometimes, I see!” It’s clear that they had been briefed about our divisions and would obviously be exploiting the same for their own gain. Your Eyewitness would be informed late in the press, that of the 250 companies that showed up to find out what exactly could be raped in the country, only 50 were local Guyanese companies!!
And even that number sounded inflated from what was on display. It’s like the announcement by one oil company of Guyanese being “half” of their employees: would’ve been better to say which “half” they were!! Sure the hewers of wood and the hauliers of water should be counted, but that’s not all that we should be, would you say?? So exactly what is going on here, with OUR oil, where we’ve supposedly HIRED the oil companies to simply provide the expertise to extract the oil since everything they provide – from a bolt to the million-barrel FPSO’s – we’re paying for??
What is going on is the PNC Government hasn’t only given away the store when they had Raphael Trotman negotiate that oil contract but by still not having a Local Content Policy legislated, we’re losing the “husk” and the corn!! Everyone knew that we had no experience in oil…but we also know that other countries that suddenly discovered the black gold, legislated that all foreign companies that wanted to get a piece of the action had to work with locals…even as “fronts”. This Government is fully aware of the argument about “affirmative action” to ensure Guyanese aren’t expected to run this oil race when they don’t even have “spike” shoes!!
To do so would not only doom us to remain mired in poverty till the end of never but convince us that it is our fault that this is so!! We’re an inferior breed.
…foreign
The PNC likes to extoll the “brilliance” of Forbes Burnham in the foreign policy area during his dictatorship between 1968 and 1985. But if you dissect his initiatives in that arena, it was always about Burnham rather than Guyana. Was this “brilliance” or megalomania?? Take his initiative on West Indian unity. He was willing to support the British proposal of a WI Federation – even though he knew structurally and institutionally we were being given a basket to fetch water. All he was interested in was to become the “first Prime Minister” of that body!!
Ditto for his efforts on Carifta and Caricom. These were simply vehicles to give him a bigger platform to strut on the world stage as he craved. If he was serious about being an alternative to the “communist” Cheddi Jagan, why did he tack leftwards with his cooperative socialist experiment?? Did that bring any benefit to Guyana – as opposed to, say, Eric Williams’ centrist position even though the latter had employed a Marxist analysis in his “Capitalism” and Slavery”??
And Granger’s going down the same road!
…on the voters’ list
GECOM’s saying the voters’ list will be ready by the end of the year. How can they even suggest this when they haven’t made a decision on the H2H data??