By Ryhaan Shah
It’s a myth that Guyana is an independent country. It’s not just the large number of aid packages granted to successive post-colonial governments that puts paid to that idea but the very notion of freedom is undermined by our own State policies and actions which allow foreign interests to dictate our future. Massa day has never been done. We simply exchanged one colonial rule for the domination of another and where there was once sugar, there is now oil.
The US and British collusion with Forbes Burnham that placed him in power in 1964 and propped up the People’s National Congress’s (PNC) dictatorial rule is textbook neo-colonialism that supported an ideology. That saga is well known and is recorded in history: US Cold War interests meant keeping Dr Cheddi Jagan out of office and the Americans found a willing partner for their strategy in Burnham.
As with colonialism, neo-colonialism is destructive to the targeted country. The US and its allies cared little about Burnham and the PNC’s institutionalised racism, its economic and political corruptions, its murders and thuggery and the wholesale social and cultural breakdown that destroyed the country. It was another round of colonial wreckage and the willing local participants at the helm made the betrayal that more repugnant.
Neo-colonialists operate by establishing good relationships with a territory’s ruling class or a section favourable to their plans in order to use them to further their own interests. It’s no secret that the US and its allies forged the APNU/AFC alliance that leveraged the PNC back into power. The PNC had served them well once before and appear quite willing to serve their interests again.
When sugar was king, it drove the rapacious, capitalist policies that exploited not only land but people to boost the profit margin. It promoted the slavery of Africans and further exploited the poor of various countries – India, China, Indonesia, Portugal – through bound labour for meagre wages and under working conditions that had changed little from slavery.
Sugar’s profitability has waned but the industrial world now has a bottomless appetite for oil to drive their manufacturing industries, and the discoveries in Guyana should put our country on the threshold of a new and lucrative economic sector that could finally lift us out of our impoverished state. But that is not to be.
The innumerable shortcomings of the contract signed between ExxonMobil and the Ganger Government continue to cause alarm. It appears that the benefits to be gained by our country will be minimal compared to those that will be reaped by ExxonMobil.
Attorney and accountant Christopher Ram states: “The Granger Government has not only emasculated itself but every succeeding Government up to the year 2056 and beyond depending on the rate of exploration and exploitation of what is possibly the largest petroleum area to have ever been granted to a foreign oil company by any sovereign state in the world in the post-colonial era.”
In an attempt to come to the Granger Government’s defence, Sherwood Lowe, in a letter to the press, reminded readers of the quote that “the worst thing for a developing country than being exploited is not being exploited”.
The quote, he stated, was coined by Shridath Ramphal and other “thinkers” in 1978 as part of the South-South Dialogue. For anyone to view exploitation – which means “taking advantage of” according to any dictionary – as a good thing, especially that of a poor country by a wealthy corporate body, is indecent. But then the quote came from Ramphal who was a willing cohort of Burnham and an active participant in that era of neo-colonial exploitation.
It is not just that the same players – local and foreign – are at the helm again but that the same indecent arguments advanced during Guyana’s previous exploitation under the PNC dictatorship are being resurrected – because, essentially, there is nothing decent that can be said to defend the indefensible.
The unequal exchange of Guyana’s oil for a pittance of ExxonMobil’s profits has been guaranteed for a generation and more and the Granger Government, even in the face of continued criticisms of the signed contract, appears unwilling to even consider a renegotiation that would give more parity to the exchange and guarantee some much-needed home-grown wealth that would push development.
The unwillingness raises questions about whether the creation of the PNC/Alliance For Change coalition and its leverage into power was part of a quid pro quo agreement. Granger’s unilateral appointment of the GECOM chair has raised further suspicions about the probable rigging of the 2020 General Elections to favour the PNC and assure ExxonMobil that its exploitative interest in our country’s oil reserves remains secure.
