A trillion-dollar business run by men with $10 heads

Jan 13, 2025
Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News- Talk about a mismatch and the evidence is overwhelming. There is Guyana’s oil patrimony and there are the stewards, the PPP Government.

Looking on, listening, reading and absorbing and contemplating, and the frightening takes shape.

There is a trillion-dollar oil sector led by men with $10 heads. When the demands of the day are for profoundness and prudence, the best that the PPP is capable of is propaganda. Chronic leadership churlishness and perversions are now inseparable from the management of this oil inheritance.

Oil is a new, unprecedented era in the annals of Guyana. Nothing comes close. A new era, a leasehold on a new life, requires a new mindset. This business calls for all Guyana’s talented to be active participants. In contrast, what is heard is this ongoing rumble of the limited, twisted, and demented. PNC did that; PPP doing this. This is more than taking dishonesty to another level; it is of deformed minds perverted, visions clouded. What can get done, what has been done, now that this complicated, fastmoving business involving a huge amount of oil is in local hands?

There is an intricate business to manage, while starting out with many deficits. Guyana doesn’t have a sufficiency of bodies to man the oil decks, and when there are a few bodies, legit questions can be raised about the quality of their heads. If those who pilot the nation and sector have trouble managing their own heads, then the prospects are dim. For then what could be said about the caliber of those who are below them? Mediocrity breeds more mediocrity. Instead of probing to find a way forward, to identify breakthrough points, what gives great psychic satisfaction is the beating of the pants off of one another.

Memories that can be inflamed instantaneously control local minds, compel Guyanese footsteps. More than five decades ago and just about five years ago can be recalled, rekindled in a flash. What space, what opening, what readiness then for prudent and sober oil management? When the best in national oil management is vital, what Guyanese get from their ruling class is an extension of Exxon management. Check their language, their postures, their passive-aggressive ways.

To pound one another into submission serves as notice of belligerence and distraction. Meanwhile, the best of the wealth keeps trekking out of here on steroids. It is easier to be about the quarrelsome, rather than dedicate energies to building relationships, bridging national gaps. The need has never been more urgent to find ways to study what is in front of us, and peer for the smallest opening, the slightest advantage. The really good legal practitioners do that, hunt for any edge, and then make it into a strength. Before taking one step, before lifting one finger, the men with $10 heads in this country back off, find ways to say what can’t be done, how much Guyana is handicapped. The negatives are blown up to such an extent that even if there was a positive or two, it gets suffocated by the weight of self-inflicted weaknesses.

The men with the $10 dollar heads in the forefront of the trillion-dollar oil sector should be relentlessly focused like a heat seeking missile on each three areas. What is going on around the offshore oil rugs, what do the Guyana-related documents of Exxon reveal, and how is the management of Exxon positioning itself. The PNC at the PPP Government’s throat, and the PPP creating opportunities to bash the PNC let’s Exxon off the hook. Guyanese diminishing Guyanese, and rather proud of it, too, is self-defeating.

This is the worst possible place for this country to be at this time. I think that because holding onto to power features so prominently, and the fear of getting on the wrong side of the masters of Exxon is such a paralyzing dread for the PPP Government’s leadership cohort that this game being played with specious comparisons involving dollars and programmes. In addition, there are those weekly leadership sessions of vitriol and lunacy that point to how men would do anything, including making complete asses of themselves, so as not to be about robust and comprehensive oil management. To do so would bring into conflict with Exxon, hold it accountable, and the latter is a nonstarter. Guyanese need originals; they have counterfeit commandoes.

Loud voices and sharp words are the favoured substitute for the same hollow men with the $10 heads in the pretense of doing something, representing something. But what are they doing if not beating futilely against the air? What is the purpose? How does what the $10 men do benefit any Guyanese in any way? All that their antics and acrobatics do is to succeed for a moment, it distracts attention from the massive failures that abound and the even more massive hauls that surround the patrimony money misused under the all-purpose farce of “national development priorities.” When the nation starves for bona fide leadership that is wise and courageous, it is treated to a series of entertainment episodes from men focused on gloss than on grit. For a leadership so unconcerned about the priority and dignity of national sovereignty, there is this blatant hypocrisy about anxieties over Nicolas Maduro and his provocative adventures involving Guyana’s territory. Men with $10 heads can only mean so much in a trillion-dollar business. Almost nothing.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

(A trillion-dollar business run by men with $10 heads)