It would appear that most Guyanese have forgotten about the “Hezekiah Effect”, which your Eyewitness had warned against when oil was struck off our waters. Even Trotman had assured us that this was the reason he hadn’t fessed up about the US$18 Bonus from the Exxon consortium to exploit the 11 billion-boe Stabroek field. It would pay to fend off the Venezuelans at the World Court!!
You don’t remember what’s the Hezekiah Effect, dear reader? Shame on you!! Here we’ve just finished celebrating the Ascension of the Prophesised One and all that!! Are you still in a haze (daze?) after your spirituous excesses? Either way, you should punish yourself with a “time out” for your transgression!
Anyhow, your (virtuous) Eyewitness will refresh your memory about the prophecy.
Hezekiah, you see, was an early King of Judah, who scrupulously followed the Lord’s 10 Commandments. He was so favoured that the Lord once killed off 180,000 Assyrians who were his enemies. (And no! It’s NOT genocide when the Lord does the mass killing.) Hezekiah even held off the dastardly Babylonians who were the rising superpower of the day.
But one day Hezekiah fell ill, and accepted a get-well gift from the Babylonians…and in a fit of bonhomie, “showed all of his treasures, all the silver and gold, and everything in his arsenal”!! That was it!! The prophet Isaiah said to Hezekiah, ‘Hear the word of the Lord: “Behold, the days are coming when all that is in your house, and what your fathers have accumulated until this day, shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left”. And lo and behold, after a while Judah was conquered, and the people were taken into slavery into Babylon!!
All because (to be clear, dear reader) Hezekiah showed off his wealth!! And so said, so done!! That Babylon to our west, Venezuela, which has long had its eyes on our territory of Essequibo, now saw our humongous newfound wealth, and envy filled its heart. We’d held them off through deft diplomacy, and were about to inflict the coup de grace by taking them to the World Court. But mostly because we had ExxonMobil as the operator of our oil find!!
That’s right, folks. Don’t think Venezuela’s THIRTY TIMES our oil reserves sated them. Babylon was far richer than Judah, but still coveted the latter’s wealth!! Does anyone really think, brave as they certainly are, our army can take on – much less take out – the Venezs?? So, when those goodly folks started talking about “renegotiating” Trotman’s contract, your Eyewitness got the shivers!! And now there’s a fever on insurance demands!!
Do we really want to lose corn (our Essequibo) and husk (our 14.5% cost oil)?? By the Rivers of Babylon??!!
…in Zimbabwe
Ahhh…how low can the mighty fall?? Imagine, at one time Robert Mugabe was such a hero in the Third World that – just before he was assassinated – Walter Rodney had sneaked off to attend the Zimbabwe independence celebrations! And now comes another story of Mugabe’s venality – a man who talked so fat back in the day about imperialists’ exploitation!! All he obviously wanted was to fill their shoes!
Bona Mugabe, his only daughter, recently filed for divorce. But court papers reveal that she owns 25 residential properties, including a Dubai mansion that’s worth around GY$17 billion!! Then there are the TWENTY-ONE farms, luxury vehicles, farming equipment, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. They acquired some of the 21 farms during the contentious takeover of white-owned farms in the early 2000s – despite the Government’s policy of “one-man one-farm”.
Zimbabweans are outraged at the news. As our South Africans at the billionaire status of their erstwhile freedom fighters!! They make Burnham look like a piker!!
…insists the PNC
Until the PNC can wipe out the stain of the way Burnham and then Granger treated coalition partners that got them into office, they’ll never have even a snowflake’s chance of surviving in hell of returning again!!
