Buktas in a knot…

…over NYT report on oil prospects
As his job demands, your (conscientious) Eyewitness scours the dailies on his phone even before rolling out of bed in the mornings. And he was quite riled up when not one, but THREE Muckraker columnists went ballistic over an article filed on our oil prospects by a New York Times reporter. From what these fellas described, the snotty foreigner “washed his mouth” all over our reputation; which wasn’t exactly stellar to begin with, thanks to the Muckraker’s sensationalism!!
Now, your Eyewitness is as patriotic as anyone out there – he’s still living here, isn’t he? So he immediately googled the NYT to read the libellous (to put it mildly) article captioned, “The $20Billion question for Guyana”. Being a US newspaper, the $ meant US greenbacks, of course. The sub-headline explained, “This largely underdeveloped country on South America’s northern Atlantic coast is the unlikely setting for the world’s next big oil boom. But is it ready to handle the riches?”
So far so good; and wasn’t this exactly what the Guyanese chatterati had been clamouring about? So your Eyewitness dug into the article, and THERE IT WAS!! The claim that we had only THREE highways! Now your Eyewitness breathed a sigh of relief, since he’d assumed that for the Muckraker reporters to become so apoplectic, the NYT gringo had actually written we had NO highways, and the “three” was a typo!!
After all, the fella was being VERY kind to say we have three highways!! Do the Muckraker wankers KNOW what are the MINIMUM requirements for a roadway to be dubbed a HIGHWAY? How about TWO lanes in either direction from end to end, plus a 10-foot shoulder? WE won’t mentions clover-leaf exits and such like!! The only one in Guyana that MAY qualify is the West Coast “road”!!
And what’s wrong about describing Georgetown as a “musty clapboard town, which seems forgotten by time, honeycombed with canals first built by Dutch settlers and African slaves”? Even the slums of Harlem are more dapper than Georgetown!! Or that blackouts are more the norm with GPL than anything else? Your Eyewitness thought the writer was being very generous when he concluded: “If all goes well, one of the poorest countries in South America could become one of the wealthiest.”
Was he being snarky when he qualified that assertion? “But there are obstacles. If history’s any guide, countries that discover oil often waste their opportunity, as the resource blends seamlessly with corruption. Countries with weak political institutions like Guyana are especially vulnerable.” Isn’t this what every Guyanese with some nous has been warning about?