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By GHK Lall
Everybody is talking about security, what is confidence-building for themselves. Oil chiefs glow with Guyana’s richness for their investors, their workers, and for themselves. All the weight, the emphases, as I assess such, are about what is good, and what is right, for foreigners. Somewhere in all of these rosy reports and predictions, their powerful public postures, I would have thought, it would have been reassuring for Guyanese-especially the poor ones, Indian ones, the Black ones, and the indigenous ones-to hear their names and their confidence, fear, and hopes come in for a little consideration. As I wait, nothing of the kind ever comes; just what is in the other direction.
John Hess is the man to pay attention to, for he speaks many mouthfuls. When Guyanese want clear understandings of their great oil wealth, they must make it their duty to listen closely to Mr. John Hess, CEO of Hess Corporation. As a 30% partner in Guyana’s oil, Mr. Hess is well positioned to speak with authority and confidence. In other words, he is in solid grounds, knows what he is talking about where matters with Guyana’s oil are concerned. Today, I focus on his public words, his contemptuous posture, relative to investor confidence, or investor security.
Fellow Guyanese, investor confidence and investor security are wrapped up in this: shareholder’s money put in Hess (ExxonMobil, and others) are safe, and that the handsome returns promised will be flowing for years to come. There is not a cloud over Guyana’s skies, nothing and no one to interfere with the Guyana profit-making machine. The big visions and bigger profits that Mr. Hess (Mr. Woods, too) has gloated about will happen, regardless of what Guyanese say, how much they rage. At the recent Scotia Howard Weil Energy Conference, John Hess was the picture of ironclad confidence, he oozed it, and his words could not have been more reassuring to his listening investors, the banks that lend the billions to finance operations in Guyana, and others with a stake in this country’s high-quality, high profit, oil.
“I think it is important for everyone to know that President (Dr. Irfaan) Ali and (Vice President) Bharrat Jagdeo, they are pro-business and they have been very clear to us and Exxon that they are going to honour the PSA that we have in the country.” It is not the first time that Mr. Hess has spoken so gushingly about how much he is absolutely certain that Guyana’s tag team of leaders (President and Vice President) will deliver, as if they have no choice, and like being in that position. ‘Pro-business’ is one that I recall well from Mr. Hess. So that all Guyanese are absolutely clear on what the Hess CEO said, it is that the 2016 PSA (oil contract) is guaranteed to stay as it is currently. It will not be touched, it will be honored, and this is regardless of what Guyanese say or do, because this is his interpretation of the assurances received from Guyana’s President and Vice President. More recently, American Ambassador Lynch added her government’s stamp of approval in what I interpret as an endorsement of where matters stand with the contract, and what such means for American and European investors and citizens.
Is it any wonder that President Ali and Vice President distance today from what they so fervently committed to before? They gave ExxonMobil, Hess Corp, and CNOOC the equivalent of a sacred, unbreakable vow, while selling the Guyanese people a pig in a bag about how they are going to be about better contract management. Obviously, both President and Vice President have not been straight with Guyanese, or true to Guyana’s cause. That is, a better deal, an agreement that gives us more for our precious oil so coveted by these greedy and rapacious foreign predators. The President and Vice President have trampled upon our trust that was so misplaced when it was vested in them. Shameless doesn’t even begin to describe these two superpatriots. Not even spineless.
John Hess could stiffen the backbone of his investors, the banks with their billions lent, and shareholders with their millions invested. It is ‘don’t worry’ Guyana is the best story in oil globally; it will continue to be so, with big thanks to President Ali and the Vice President. They are the most helpful brothers and the best of partners to foreign investors who profit from ripping off Guyanese. Ali and the VP are selling their deceptive stories to the hopeful Guyanese public (‘wrong end of the stick’ and ‘criminal contract’), while they are telling the oil companies that they have nothing to worry about. Are these men patriotic Guyanese leaders, or unspeakable schemers working for foreign oil scavengers? Again what about poor Indian and Black and Amerindian Guyanese with no confidence remaining? Who speaks, stands, for them? Who?
For there is Mr. Hess speaking boldly about what he had to have received from President Ali and Jagdeo: don’t take Guyanese seriously, let them vent, it will fade soon. This is the only translation that can be given to Hess’s arrogant mocking of Guyanese before his audience of concerned investors that they will “hear noise from time to time about the PSA.” This is how these wily foreign invaders, these corporate schemers divide us, insult us, rule us: our future is “noise.” Our concern about prospering from our patrimony is “noise.” I ask myself if President and Vice President are the source of that word “noise.” Tacuma Ogunseye must be noise too.
Guyanese: isn’t time that we make these men eat their words? Isn’t time that foreign investor confidence and security become secondary to Guyanese confidence and economic security? Isn’t it time that we show men like Woods, Hess, Routledge and local leaders that Guyanese are more than about “noise”? That the day has come for all the disdain, the lies, and the oil evils to cease? That conscientious Indians, Africans, and Amerindians have had enough, with no security, confidence left?
