Dear Editor,
You do not buy a bottle of water that is not properly full, because you can see through the container. But if you buy a bottle of cooking gas, you cannot see if you are getting value unless the bottle is weighed on a standard scale, or unless you believe the seal has been properly set and has not been tampered with. The less the transparency the more (good, open) regulations are required to recover the transparency. Transparency Insti-tute Guyana Inc. (TIGI) has shown in many essentially uncontested articles, in 2018 and 2019, that the Pro-duction Sharing Agreement (PSA) with the Oil Companies violated Guyana’s laws. Moreover the PSA adds regulations, not to increase transparency, but to deny verification of production figures, not only of oil, but also of gas and how much is reinjected, vented or flared.
It is now 3 months since TIGI has asked the Ministry of Natural Resources to provide the daily production information for the oil we are paying the companies to explore for, to drill for, to store and mostly to sell for us. There is still no information. Is eyepass. Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited (EEPGL) has severely limited any Guyanese oversight of production, storage and offloading, requiring 7 days’ notice of inspection. So they and the Government they colonized are not worried when we debate about this and that percent of productions, ventings and flarings. There are no figures to use percentages on and no times with corresponding oil prices. So the Guyanese citizen remains in ignorance and cannot check what we are told.
Even the Environmental Protec-tion Agency (EPA) doesn’t know; because they said to me recently they will remind the Ministry of Natural Resources for TIGI. The point is, the EPA, by virtue of its mandate, must be required to know. How else can they assess any threat to the environment? It is highly unsatisfactory for citizens to have to cajole, so far unsuccessfully, publicly funded authorities like the Government and the EPA, to provide the necessary information, despite constitutional and international commitments. If this continues we will have to conclude that the Government and the EPA are deliberately making (bad, secret) regulations in order to prevent transparency.
Sincerely,
Alfred Bhulai
TIGI
