Dear Editor,
I start by disclosing that here, in Washington, I read our four newspapers daily to try to stay in touch with my Guyana.
Perhaps because I’m detached from Guyana, I take what’s written and reported in them too seriously. Perhaps, too, out of my training as an engineer, I am too alert to potential or real areas and modes of failing under the load.
Five road deaths in 24 hours and 3 drownings the day after constitute a huge rate of loss to our nation, and it rings a cautionary bell. Seems to me to be a call for us to make things calmer without slowing, as we get on with our living, our rapid growth and development, in a more pleasing and pleasant manner. Seems to me to be a call to lower our levels of anxiety, frustration, anger and worry; a call to put aside much that is just riling us up; a call for us to be more courteous and kinder to each other, and about giving a break to each other.
It is for such reasons that I felt a need to tell how disturbed I was on reading the Editorial in Kaieteur News of Tuesday, 25th February, 2025: “What about us” — hammering again the misconceived, poisonous allegations of us being cheated and robbed blind by EXXON, HESS and CNOOC.
Oh, if the Editor could only recognize how much such articles are contributing to the generation of great anger, frustration and unmet expectations in our society; which are so evident in many of the reports of domestic and other violence, crimes, traffic accidents, drownings and so on.
We need to change that tune. We need to be celebrating, to be joyful and happy with the discovery and rapid development of the oil that was formed off our shores a billion years or more ago.
Can I dare to say that we could be thankful to EXXON, HESS and CNOOC, as well as SHELL, TOTAL, HOME OIL CGX and CGX-ON SHORE, and all the others who came before; who, over many preceding decades, would not have found anything economic and would have left empty-handed?
What about us (Guyanese)? Well, we, each of us, have now much better conditions to get going. We, each of us, must get going in doing something to improve our future now. We should be turning ourselves (at least in spirit) into little EXXONs, little HESSes and little CNOOCs.
Yes, without thinking, we can easily feel extorted and cheated with all that talk about the Exxon consortium receiving billions while we are receiving tens of millions, conveniently forgetting that they are paying down billions for each FPSO.
From many sides have I seen and lived many of these questions, and I would say – as my mother used to tell me – that until you know, it is the easiest thing to begrudge others and count their money, without knowing how hard they might have worked and what they might have had to do to acquire and accumulate what they have.
Before we feel extorted and cheated, let us learn how EXXON, HESS and CNOOC in particular, and the whole oil and gas industry in general, got to where they are today: how the industry was born, grew, evolved and developed. These days we can easily go to Google.
I do not think Mr Hess would object to me repeating here the story he readily tells about how his father got going. The third son, graduating from secondary school as the great crash of the late 1920s deepened, he could not follow his elder brothers to college, he had to go to work. So, on the first day of his first job, he was delivering bags of heating coal on his back to various homes in New York. He turned that beginning into a great start, learning the heating and energy business from the ground up. To keep our own Guyanese end up, I refer similarly to our great Edward Beharry about a few years later, starting off making and selling sweets on the trains then running along our East Coast railway. When we look, we will find small beginnings at the start of many big things around us.
Along my 81 years of age, I have learnt that once we start by truly and knowledgeably putting ourselves in the other guys/gals’ shoes, it is more natural and easier to make friends rather than enemies, and to find win-win relationships.
I put it that any of us who are not yet on that road can become good friends with EXXON, HESS and CNOOC. Even though I might well be gone by the time we build our nation and make ourselves rich and prosperous, I encourage us all, everyone, to so endeavour. I know it is challenging, but we can do it; for it is the direction in which individuals, groups, societies, nations, all human kind, have been treading.
I continue to be thankful to the late Bobby Moore, for opening my eyes in his lively presentation over the late 1950s and early 1960s of that annual GCE “O” Level course “Modern Britain”, to the challenges as well as the sure rewards of great pride to be had in developing and modernizing our country. No doubt, his presentations affected many of my generation in our different ways: Walter Rodney, Tommy Payne, Winston McGowan and Rupert Roopnaraine.
For me, the story of the UK in the lead of Europe from about 1500, transiting from the traditions of farming with animals to the nuclear bombs at the end of World War II – that very turbulent, pioneering, stormy ride through the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions and the accompanying economic, social and political revolutions, anyone at times leading and at other times following; and all interacting at all times — is a process we have to get through ourselves.
Perhaps it might have been because, in the early 1950s, I had been helping in our three acres of rice field: chasing the bulls, helping to move sheaves of paddy cut with grass knives (sickles) while seeing tractors and combines appearing in other fields, that I sensed and longed for us to get on to, and along the road of, development; to rapidly catch up with the developed countries, hurrying ourselves in decades through a comparable series of evolving stages of growth which the developed countries took themselves through in centuries.
What about us (Guyanese)? We want to be developed rapidly: let us make good friends (not enemies unnecessarily) of Exxon, HESS and CNOOC; they already know lots that we need to learn, much of it beyond oil. Let us give it a try. I learnt a lot (much of it beyond bauxite and alumina) from the people of ALCAN/DEMBA.
Sincerely,
Samuel A A Hinds
Former Prime Minister
and Former President
Ambassador to the
USA and OAS
