Dear Editor,
There is an old saying with some validity that states “out of evil cometh good”. Human history has witnessed this apparent contradiction but a truism. Reading media reports of this tragic Iran US-Israeli war, states that oil prices, with or without the G-7 intervention could increase as much as twenty percent.
The assumption is there will be no significant increase in the cost of harvesting our oil, speaking with experts, a conservative estimate of the amount the companies will now obtain is an increase of at least thirty million US dollars daily, this is as additional and unexpected revenue to the oil companies operating in Guyana. That oil is the gift of the Creator to the people of Guyana.
My suggestion is that His Excellency the President immediately consult and summon the four parties represented in parliament, and obtain an agreement that he as Head-of-State call-in all of the companies harvesting our oil, and request that there be direct transfer to the treasury of at least eighty percent of this windfall.
And further that this sum be made available post haste to be shared and distributed to all government workers and pensioners using an agreed formula, a formula that will not exclude non-government workers from this bounty. Addressing cost of living and inflation is of course another matter
The President and his team should first say that if the Middle East crisis is resolved and there is some level of normalcy, then things should return as is.
The parties in parliament should let the president know that when he engages those who are extracting our oil and, that he has the mandate, and he is speaking on behalf of 99.9 percent of Guyanese, and that he expects no vacillation. Our president must have the gumption to ensure that the poor are not made poorer as a result of the spike in oil prices.
Those of us who lived through the horrors of the oil crisis of the 70s, which begun after the Yom Kippur war of October 1973, must know that we are now in the glorious group of being a major oil producing country, unlike in the 70s. Guyana let’s go forward, never backwards.
Yours truly,
Elder Hamilton Green
