It’s of more than passing interest that more than three centuries after the founding of the three colonies that became “Guyana”, we still refer to our “interior” – an amorphous, undifferentiated blob behind our coastland where most of us continue to live! What makes it even more interesting was the founders had actually first settled parts of that “interior” – the riverain areas along the rivers and creeks. They established plantations for tropical agricultural crops to sell to European markets. Look how deep in the interior was Cuffy’s Rebellion and Kyk over All!!
What makes their experience relevant for us today is that when the fertility of those soils were depleted within a century, they moved to the mangrove-and-mosquito infested coast and carved out the now inhabited Atlantic coast! Yet even though we’ve become more densely packed than the tiny Caribbean Islands and can’t even get land to build houses – all the while knowing that the rising Atlantic’s gonna engulf us sooner rather than later. We still cling to a single road and look on maps like ants clinging to a string!!
Some will flippantly say, “Well the Dutch had slaves to do the backbreaking work of moving millions of tons of wet soils”!! But we do have excavators, bulldozers and draglines, don’t we?? Burnham tried but his National Service, volunteer labour was bound to fail. The US continent wasn’t opened up by volunteer labour – but by good, old, greedy Robber Barons like Vanderbilt who just wanted to make money!! If we had the will of those old Dutchmen – who were motivated by wealth as well! – we coulda long been inland and enjoying the bounty of our continental destiny!! But they say it’s never too late, don’t they??
Pres Ali appears to have that will power – and his party has long abandoned their socialist cant. They’ve openly embraced the principle that “private enterprise will be the engine of growth”!! So while he announced that the building of Silica City will be kicked off this year with the first 100 houses, that’s just the beginning and the plans must be made available to the private sector to execute. It’s money that makes the world go round – and will make the opening up of our “interior’ a reality.
The completion of the Highway to Lethem will make the “Highway to happiness” a reality. Can you see the effects on development in having a five-hundred-mile highway opening up 86,000 square miles of real estate for development in an oil-fuelled economy!! Guyanese have to be prepared to follow the slogan “Go South, young man – and woman”. There’s a whole new world beckoning and it will go to the bold.
And maybe we’ll stop killing each other for house lots??
…to Venezuela
Your Eyewitness doesn’t want you to think, dear reader, that he’s joined the ranks of the “conspiracy theorists”. But he has a nagging worry about what’s gonna follow the now very clear American pivot to Venezuela. First, we had those exchange of prisoners, then the renewal of Chevron’s license to work with PVDSA to ship Venezuelan Oil stateside- and now giving Trinidad the greenlight to exploit the gigantic Venezuelan Dragon gas fields. Even as we’ll be having gas coming out of our kazoos as we continue to bring up our gas-associated light crude.
All of this against the background of the Venezuelan Opposition dumping the hapless Guaido and installing a new, female head to broker a rapprochement with Maduro. The end game, of course – even if the war in Europe hadn’t roiled the oil markets – are those 300 million barrels of Venezuelan oil reserves!! That makes our 13 billion look like peanuts.
And peanuts aren’t gonna hold off a united Venezuelan obsession with our land.
…to welfare economics
Your Eyewitness is pleased the government has continuing supporting -and even extending – our socialized medical and educational systems. Now we gotta convince the burgeoning private sector that they gott pay their taxes to support said systems!!
