“Guyana Times and ExxonMobil: Partners in the Politics of Deception”
Dear Editor,
Once again, Guyana Times lends its editorial pages to the convenient laundering of ExxonMobil’s talking points, parading corporate spin as economic insight. The paper continues to act less as a watchdog and more as a willing amplifier for whatever Exxon’s executives need the public to believe. In giving Alistair Routledge a platform to peddle half‑truths about Guyana’s “increasing share” of oil profits, Guyana Times abandons its duty to question power and instead becomes its enabler. At this rate, the newspaper’s masthead might as well read “Public Relations Office — ExxonMobil Guyana Division.”
It never ceases to amaze how deftly ExxonMobil’s local frontmen try to turn facts inside out and sell the distortion as national uplift. Alistair Routledge’s latest sermon, eagerly massaged by the usual press chorus, attempts to dress up the same exploitative arithmetic in patriotic colours — the preposterous idea that Guyana is somehow about to reap “increased profits” from the Stabroek Block simply because global oil prices have soared above the hundred‑dollar mark. The math is not new, and the game is not noble. What remains constant — depressingly constant — is Guyana’s slice of the pie: a fixed 14.5 percent, once royalties are counted, locked tight by the 2016 Production Sharing Agreement that ExxonMobil and its partners cling to like a royal charter. Volume and price do not magically expand our percentage; they only fatten the absolute sum on which that meagre fraction is calculated. It is not a more generous share — only a larger illusion.
Nowhere in Routledge’s triumphal arithmetic does he mention that the very price boom he celebrates carries a double-edged cost for Guyana. The same windfall that enlarges Government revenue also swells Exxon’s profits — and because the PSA obligates the nation to shoulder Exxon’s income tax, Guyana ends up paying more as their gains grow.
Imagine the absurdity: the higher Exxon earns, the higher the tax bill that the people of Guyana must settle on their behalf. A paradox masquerading as partnership. The Government is forced to part with its own earnings to sponsor the tax liabilities of a trillion‑dollar oil consortium, and we are told to be grateful for the “dynamic world” this engenders. It is, in reality, the same exploitative structure — only lubricated by global turmoil.
This disinformation is painfully familiar: recast colonial logic through corporate PR. “We are delivering what the contract intended,” they say — and that much, at least, is true. The PSA was tailored not for national transformation, but for maximal investor security. Routledge’s talk of the country “moving into a more positive trajectory” is merely code for stabilizing ExxonMobil’s rent‑seeking operation under the cover of crisis. The war‑induced spike in prices, tragic as its origins might be, is being spun as providence when it is in fact profiteering. And worse — they suggest that cost recovery could be achieved earlier than expected, as if this accelerates Guyana’s pathway to prosperity. But that recovery milestone merely signifies that
Exxon’s books are closer to zero; it does not renegotiate the contract, it does not rebalance the injustice, and it certainly does not recalibrate the paltry revenue stream that flows into our Natural Resource Fund.
If Guyana is to be the custodian of its own destiny, we must not let these semantic tricks pass as policy truths.
Higher prices do not heal a broken deal. The response cannot be muted compliance while a multinational dictates the terms of national fortune. At the very least, economic logic and moral justice demand compensation through a sovereign‑imposed windfall tax — an offset against the escalating taxes we pay on Exxon’s behalf. Such a measure would be neither punitive nor radical; it is simple equity. When global conditions artificially inflate corporate profits, the host nation must claim proportional reward for its resource wealth, not proportional tax exposure.
The so‑called “positive trajectory” is a mirage. Guyana’s reality remains what it has always been under this lopsided agreement: the producer of wealth but not the possessor of it. The guardianship of the public purse now requires more than polite engagement with corporate spin — it calls for confrontation, for the recovery of truth itself. Let ExxonMobil’s propaganda rest where it belongs: in the rubbish heap of rhetorical deceit, while Guyana begins the harder work of demanding fairness in substance, not illusion.
Sincerely,
Hemdutt Kumar
