A new syndrome affecting some political commentators – the BJ obsession

Bharrat Jagdeo and the PPP, under President Irfaan Ali, have ensured that Guyana benefits meaningfully from Guyana’s oil and gas resources. Nothing happening in Guyana right now would have been possible without oil and gas and without EXXON and its partners deciding in 1999 to sign an exploration agreement with the Janet Jagan-led PPP Government.
In every community, roads, streets, and bridges are being reconstructed or constructed for the first time. New schools are being built where no schools existed before. New hospitals are being established in communities that never had hospitals and old hospitals are being reconstructed. Public servants have had significant pay increases. Several cash-transfer programmes are in place. More than 15,000 Guyanese young people have scholarships. More than 3000 nurses will be trained in the next three years. Major new highways and river bridges are under construction. The first phase of the Linden-to-Lethem Road is being constructed. A new bridge linking Guyana and Suriname will soon begin. New hotels, with more than 3000 rooms, are being constructed. A new airport, stadium and shopping malls are being constructed in Region Six. New businesses are sprouting here, there and everywhere. Guyana is booming. Guyana has become a country everyone everywhere in the world is watching. Suddenly, countries which essentially barred Guyanese from visiting are allowing visa-free entry.
Guyana, under APNU/AFC, signed a one-sided Production Service Agreement (PSA) with EXXON. But Guyana is brilliantly navigating the deal to its own benefit, under Bharrat Jagdeo’s leadership. While Raphael Trotman signed a bad deal with EXXON, Irfaan Ali and Bharrat Jagdeo are ensuring that Guyana extracts as much from the deal as possible. But the naysayers ignore that it was APNU/AFC which signed the deal and that it was Raphael Trotman who went to Texas in the belly of EXXON and signed the deal. And someone in APNU/AFC is responsible for hiding the US$18M bonus. But no one is calling Trotman “Mr Exxon Mobil”. No one is blaming David Granger and APNU/AFC.
Instead, their focus is on Irfaan Ali and the PPP Government and on Bharrat Jagdeo. Their obsession with BJ is so great that a whole newspaper is dedicated to the anti-Jagdeo movement. All of the anti-Jagdeo commentators promote the notion that BJ is evil. One of the commentators deemed BJ a manipulator par excellence. Another commentator called BJ an “intriguer”, the best of the best, better than Brutus and Cassius, whatever that means. They insist that BJ is in the pockets of EXXON, even calling him Bharrat “Mr. Exxon Mobil” Jagdeo, claiming that when Alistair Routledge and Darren Woods tell BJ to jump, he jumps as high as he could.
The naysayers provide no evidence to demonstrate that Jagdeo is in the pockets of EXXON, other than BJ is the architect of the Irfaan Ali-led Government’s decision not to pursue a renegotiation of the EXXON contract. They falsely claim that BJ himself promised to renegotiate the contract. But the PPP in its campaign for the March 2020 elections made clear that any elected PPP Government will honour all international contracts legally signed. With thousands of pages of newspaper articles and thousands of minutes on radio, none of the naysayers have provided any evidence that the EXXON contract was illegal. They conveniently ignore to tell the Guyanese people that the contract can only be renegotiated if both sides agree. EXXON has made it clear that it will not agree to any renegotiation.
BJ, as the lead on oil and gas for the PPP Government, has crafted a strategy to ensure that all new PSAs have better terms for Guyana. For example, the royalty rate of 2% in the EXXON deal will be a minimum of 10% in any new deal, with profit sharing at 50% and the oil companies in the new PSAs limited to only 65% recovery on their investment each year. Second, the Government has plugged some of the holes in the EXXON deal. It has ensured that there is a flaring policy to limit flaring and any flaring that is necessary will have a fee linked to it. The original deal permitted unlimited flaring. There is now a real-time audit for the expenses claimed by EXXON. The 1999 to 2019 expenses were not audited until 2021. Now the 2020/2021 audit is already being done. There is a strong local content law to ensure Guyanese businesses benefit. To this end, when EXXON decided to procure their own vehicles, the Government did not permit them, insisting that EXXON must procure transportation services from local service providers. EXXON has been forced to take out a meaningful insurance. Soon the gas-to-energy project will become reality and by 2025, consumers will see their electricity bills reduced by 50%.
BJ has ensured that a bad deal signed between the Granger-led Government, Raphael Trotman and EXXON works for the Guyanese people. The naysayers have ignored the inconvenient truth that Jagdeo and the PPP had nothing to do with hiding a US$18M bonus, had nothing to do with giving tax-free privilege to EXXON, had nothing to do with EXXON not having to pay taxes, etc. They pretend that Trotman, Granger and the APNU/AFC Government had nothing to do with the bad EXXON deal. Instead, with their sick obsession with BJ, they decided to make him a bogeyman, blaming him for a bad EXXON deal.
The truth is that BJ is leading a strategy in which Guyana has turned a really bad deal to its advantage and is benefiting from it, transforming the country’s economy, physical and social infrastructure and setting-up Guyana to benefit even more from newer PSAs. Bharrat Jagdeo is the genius behind this transformation.