There is an old saying that two captains cannot steer a ship. And indeed if that happens, surely there would be disaster.
An extension to this saying is that two man rat can’t live in de same hole. In reality, in the animal world, the dominant male is the one who calls the shots. He chases away any challenger or is chased out. This seems not to be the case in Guyana.
President Irfaan Ali visited the Dominican Republic, recently, where he signed a Memorandum of Understanding. One of these had to do with an oil refinery. After the signing, the local newspapers screamed that Guyana was prepared to share the proceeds from the oil refinery on a 51 to 49 per cent basis. The Dominican Republic would take the lion’s share.
The establishment of the oil refinery would lead to lower gasoline prices in Guyana. At least that was the belief.
The ink had barely dried when Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo at one of his weekly press conferences appeared to negate what President Ali did in the Dominican Republic. Jagdeo reportedly said that any refinery would have to be built in Guyana. President Ali has said nothing about this direct attack on his authority. He is presiding over history.
Nowhere in the world has a junior been known to overturn a decision by a sitting president. This cannot be seen as a power struggle. It is merely a case of one individual asserting his authority.
But there seems to be a lot to establishing a refinery in Guyana. The large oil extraction vessels produce at least one million barrels of oil per day. No vessel that size could enter Port Georgetown. So, that being the case, the oil would have to be offloaded onto smaller vessels. That has a cost.
However, that is the least of the problems.
There would have to be storage facilities for the oil to be refined. And after the refining, there would have to be storage facilities for the refined products, be they gasoline, diesel and heavy fuel oil.
The question of a refinery in Guyana is nothing but a pipe dream. But as the Alliance For Change has said, the government is merely producing pipe dreams. There is no movement on any of the major projects that the government has promoted.
The AFC pointed to the new Demerara Harbour Bridge which is scheduled to be completed by 2025. The contract was signed in 2022. Not a pile has been driven.
There is no work on the approaches. Anyone anticipating the construction of the bridge must come to the conclusion that the project has been cancelled.
It is the same with the Corentyne River Bridge. That was the bridge to link Guyana and Suriname. There was a lot of fanfare when the project was mooted. Funding was expected to be completed and works should have begun on the bridge. Instead, there is a marked silence on this project. The ferry continues to operate, sometimes breaking down and forcing people to rely on the so-called backtrack.
In fact, the government has signalled its intention to formalise the backtrack travel. There is a reported plan to install Customs and Immigration services at Moleson Creek. That would be easy to achieve.
There was a major announcement of a four-lane highway linking Ogle to Diamond or wherever. That project should have been completed in another few months. No one knows where this road is.
The government then announced that it was removing the Trinidad company, Kallco, from the project it gained. There was also talk of blacklisting this company. This was one of the companies linking Dennis Street, Campbellville with Conversation Tree.
A newspaper reported on Tuesday that 65 per cent of the contract time has elapsed but only 25 per cent of the work has been completed. And a lot of money has been put into this project—some $2 billion.
More significant is the gas to shore project. Previous feasibility studies were discarded. The government opted to land the pipeline at Wales, West Bank Demerara.
We know that ExxonMobil has demanded a substantial amount of money to land the pipeline. The government is not reporting on the progress of this project. This project is touted to lower electricity costs.
Then there is the talk about importing labour. Guyana has a high unemployment rate. People are complaining that they cannot get jobs but the government wants to ease the unemployment in some Asian country while maintaining Guyana’s high unemployment rate.
The word is that Guyana does not have the skills. Guyana has been known to export skills. The sugar industry in the Caribbean is just one that was developed and maintained by skilled Guyanese.
There are the technical institutes and the trade schools in Guyana. What are these producing? Surely there are welders and masons and technicians graduating. But recently, the Labour Minister said that our welders and masons would have to be further trained to be accepted by the foreign companies coming here.
So why hasn’t the training curriculum been developed at our various training centres? Instead, the Labour Minister said that he is building some training centres. And at the same time this is happening, Guyana continues to haemorrhage the skills that it has.
There is a report that during the first six months of this year, the country lost 100 nurses. To compensate, the government is taking people off the streets, training them for two weeks and placing them in the hospitals and health centre with dire consequences.
A man died at the West Demerara Regional Hospital after one of these newly trained people took his vital signs. The blood pressure reading was drastically low but this trained person considered it normal.
Rather than rushing the man to the Intensive Care Unit, she left him sitting in the wheelchair. He died there before being attended to.
There are reports that some of them can barely read. This is the government’s response to the nursing situation. All that is needed is to pay those who are still here, better. The health care system could end up like some of the proposed projects—just words and photo opportunities of sod turning.
