Under the threat of torture, the Pope in 1633 forced Galileo to recant his theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not the other way round. As he left the courtroom, Galileo is said to have muttered, ‘All the same, it moves’. Well, the Earth has kept moving, and, after every 365 days, it is back where it began and we are ending another year – this time 2023. It is our tradition that, as the “old year” ends, we reflect on noteworthy events that occurred, and make plans for the new this year – as the Earth continues its eternal movement around our Sun.
In 2023, we continued our journey out of the poverty into which we had become mired during the long PNC dictatorship, between 1968 and 1992. It is not our intent to cast blame on that party, but to point out that even though we have a sizeable inflow of funds due to our share of the oil funds, so had the PNC in 1974, when the price of our main export, sugar, skyrocketed and the imposition of a sugar levy brought a huge windfall into our treasury. The then Government did not expend the money strategically, but rather frittered it away on boondoggles intended to satisfy its political base. If we are not to repeat their mistake, we will have to resist the various “declarations” being made from some quarters for US$5000 from the oil revenues to be transferred directly into the pockets of each Guyanese family without any needs or other test. With our country having more than 200,000 families, this means that over US$1billion would be transferred to consumers, and not spent on national development. This is the kind of populist thinking that not only brought our economy crashing down our ears during the 1970s, but also did the same in neighbouring Venezuela, where, beginning in 1999, the Chavez Administration seemed determined to repeat every mistake Burnham made over here.
And this brings us to the other noteworthy event of this year: the frantic efforts of Chavez’s successor Maduro to deflect from their policy failures and antidemocratic rule by reviving the old controversy they raised in 1962 over our Essequibo region. Starting from his accession to office in 2013, Maduro demonstrated that he was willing to move from words into action when he had the Venezuelan Navy seize an oil exploration vessel belonging to Texas oil company Anadarko. This harassment escalated after the ExxonMobil consortium struck oil in 2015, just when we had a change of Government from the PPP to an APNU/AFC coalition.
Our Government followed the diplomatic path we have doggedly traversed since 1966 when we signed the Geneva Agreement with Venezuela, detailing steps that could be taken to resolve the controversy over the status of the 1899 Arbitral Award that Venezuela had agreed was a “full and final” settlement. As Venezuela broke the fundamental international law – pacta sunt servanda: “agreements must be honoured” — and refused to accept the jurisdiction of the Geneva Agreement-mandated ICJ when it became clear that the latter’s ruling would not be in their favour, Maduro suddenly announced this month, following a bogus “referendum”, that they were annexing Essequibo, which is two-thirds of our national territory. Maduro is clearly contemptuous of the international institutions that are in place to mediate between states.
Our Government once again followed a diplomatic path when Pres Ali accepted an invitation by Caricom and CELAC to meet Maduro face-to- face, but Venezuela reiterated its insistence that it does not recognize the ICJ’s jurisdiction, which we do. As such, while we have a breathing space over the holidays, it is evident from Maduro’s recent intemperate flaunting of Venezuela’s overwhelming military might at the visit of a single British patrol ship that next year will continue to be challenging to our nation.
Against this background, we, the Guyanese people, must resolve to put aside our internal differences to face the threat from the west.
