Dear Editor,
I refer to the headline article titled, `Badal proposes shares for all citizens in national oil company’ (SN January 8). It is a sweeping vision that is worthy of a headline, and several times over. It certainly has a world of potential. I add a few related thoughts.
Finally, a political contestant has come up with the trailblazing and groundbreaking. I think that Mr. Badal and his group should be lauded for such a sprawling, comprehensive vision of how to go about the continuously thorny, endlessly disputatious, eternally suspicious business of what to do with our national oil gifts. More specifically of what to do about putting to rest the distrust of a great many citizens, who fear being marginalized and left out of the prosperity that is to come, who fear the machinations of his political group and that one coming with their rosy outlook and their perfumed presences.
It is certainly worth listening to, deserves some more probing, and could be representative of that which settles an enormous amount-immeasurable, to be accurate-of the fears and anxieties of this country’s small population. It is a population that is apprehensive of where this segment or that segment will be when this oil blessing actually materializes, if their own people do not succeed at the upcoming elections and, are thus not at the helm in the driving seat of governance. That would be governance, which assures them of something from the oil riches, which is all that matters for many. Of course, that is if the leaders of the electorally triumphant group do not parcel out and hog all that comes for themselves. As in Nigeria and other forlorn Third World places. It is a big ‘if’ and a constantly haunting one right here in Guyana for those who expect and wait and depend.
Editor, a national oil company, in all of its most transparent and on the table openness, enables clarity and delivers comfort, since everyone is a shareholder, and everyone is entitled to peer into what goes on behind the numbers, behind the management veils, and behind the political stewardship, which is too frequently murky and unsatisfying. The latter is the cause of much consternation that just would not go away. I like the rights that come with being a private participant in a public entity. This would not be about talk and promises and the usual deception and shakedown, which is the equivalent of” ‘leave this to us, we know what is best, and we are looking out for all the rest of you. Trust us on this one.’
The first problem is that trust is in short supply; in fact, there is no supply at all, such is the low ebb to which Guyanese have been hurled and buried year after year, and from which they quite rightly reel and recoil and say on behalf of themselves: not again. Not this time. Not on this one involving oil. The second issue is that no right-thinking citizen, no citizen who has all of his or her wits about them, believes for a New York minute that anybody is looking out for them. Not even their own. Things have deteriorated so badly in this society that there is legitimate fear that, should push comes to shove, the small man, the ordinary citizen, would be left out in the cold, while the political elites from both sides of the now combustible divide divvy up the riches among themselves.
The third trouble, from the perspective of watching citizens, is that this whole oil arrangement and development-and the associated apparatus-has left much to be desired from the inception. The government itself has acknowledged some missteps, which in terms of the national oil trust (that of citizens) is almost nonexistent in some quarters. Those are not minor, inconsequential quarters, but significant portions of the population. And these questions, concerns, and misgivings are not easily resolved, or settled satisfactorily, through the sweet, soothing carrot of next time will be better and look at all the great plans that we have, as offered by this one or the other one. Very few believe, beyond the respective circles of diehards and the well-positioned. Now that Mr. Badal and his people have perked interest and stirred the pot-let it be admitted, in a revolutionary manner-the proof will be in the implementation and fulfillment. The immediate challenge for the originators of this warming proposal is to manage to get past Nomination Day tomorrow. If they do, then they can infuse still more life to what I welcome as different and significant.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
