To my Guyanese family, congratulations. And yes, we’s all family; the boats just stopped different places. So doh pull me into no stupidness about curry chicken vs chicken curry or eggball vs doubles, meen ha time fuh dat.
I know that CPL victory will be an immense source of pride as sports has often been for many of us. I hope that this sporting victory inspires in the rest of the country the sort of pride that is then channelled into a sense of purpose in other areas the way West Indies cricket did from the 1950s to the 90s or how Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis and Jack Johnson inspired millions in their respective eras.
Because now there’s something else that requires your nationalistic passion; the unpleasant reality that is shaping up between oil giant ExxonMobil, your own government vs the citizens whose interests it is supposed to look after, means that certain warnings have come to pass. You got a major oil and gas find and one setta vultures, including one of the biggest in the game, began circling with the intent of making off with what should be benefitting you first and foremost. Put another way, regardless of how many boundaries the team made on the field, the oil company whose name is on their clothes is in the process of bowling out the whole country with all sorts of googlies and bouncers…..and your managers helping them too it seems.
Doh get tie up inno, I eh jealous allyuh, I rel happy for that oil find jed. But not all skin teeth are smiles and this is not at all a game run on fairness. Despite this being the age of instantly accessible information, far too many innocently walk around believing that our world is just about impersonal buying, selling, supply, demand and markets with a level playing field; no ideology other than making a profit (itself very problematic). Our respective Ministries of Education never saw it worthwhile to show that the colonialism we read about in History (if that’s even taught at all) continues in different forms today because the old method of using armed force doesn’t always work. We in Trinidad had the first oil well ever dug back in 1866 and right away those intrepid explorers put things in place to make sure that profits went principally one way — to them, not us.
Why the irrelevant history lesson? Simple, that’s how you understand what is being done to you now. 500 years ago the early joint-stock companies guided the policies of the monarchy, today we have an ExxonMobil that, according to researchers like Steve Coll, has its own independent sense of sovereignty, its own foreign policy, which renders that of even the US Government almost completely irrelevant. In any event, many of its senior execs went on to become key members of the US Government, a couple Presidents and Vice-Presidents, or were schoolmates or neighbours of those who were. The hands of the current US Secretary of State are no less filthy. There aren’t a lot of systems more corrupt and your country is smack dab in this one — your own corruption issues aside.
Now yes, we know in any major business arrangements some information is kept secret. However, we also know that no system of doing business shaped by exploiting labour for just over 700 years, that developed philosophies justifying that exploitation from the liberalism of Locke to the libertarianism of Koch going to just so become “universal best practice” — which translates into anything remotely resembling FAIR practice.
Long before the leeches made arguments that no sovereign country of the “darker races” as some called it, had any sovereign claim over whatever resources lay in their own territory because they were in the South and as such, according to George Kennan (regarding Venezuelan oil), we wouldn’t know what to do with it anyhow. Yeah, long before that them fellas was already creating systems and commercial practices to make sure we job here was only to work hard on their behalf; our countries were set up to be work stations, not nations, and cogs in a wheel that was a global division of labour in which we were only to be extractors, little else. They set up prestige schools to train some of we best and brightest — like one former finance minister who now has his own radio programme — to use all sorts of mental gymnastics to explain all this as universal best practice as if coloniality itself wasn’t and remains for the time being also universal.
Already, the signs are clear that this is precisely what ExxonMobil is doing to you. Indeed, they are engaged in pure old extractivism; classic Plantation Economic Theory where a foreign company comes in, extracts your raw resources, refines it elsewhere and the manufactured products sold back to you. Ms Melinda Janki and Dr Vincent Adams, your former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has made some astonishing statements where ExxonMobil doesn’t even obey local laws — and pressuring to have them changed — that leads me to wonder about what goes on in my own country (actually I already know). What’s the point, for instance, of swelling with nationalistic pride over the winning of a cricket trophy when the company that sponsored it is at the same time locking you out from knowing what is going on with your resources? How can anyone tolerate the fact that it’s almost impossible for you to independently check how much oil do you really have, how much it costs to extract it, etc? Additionally, as Dr Adams asserted, how does one explain why in the contract any investigative body has to give SEVEN days notice prior to visiting a site? Talk about making room for mischief.
Take this example from another highly dubious company, BP, when it controlled oil production in Iran, there were two sets of figures: what was shown to the Iranians and one they kept for themselves and no Iranian was allowed to do any independent fact-checking. No wonder Mohammed Mossadegh nationalised the industry and kicked them out….of course, we saw what happened after
Which brings us to the ideologies that drive senior executives who sit on the boards. Normally, in a progressive society looking to decolonise itself and move on ahead making life better for all its citizens, it should be deeply worrying that at least one senior executive member, who went on to become US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, is a devotee of Ayn Rand. Yes, that Ayn Rand, Hitler chain-smoking in a dress. But in my country, since all that matters are dollars, how the dollars are acquired and kept are never an issue…..until they become one.
So jealous haters like myself who tried to warn you early on not to get blindly into bed with such vipers as ExxonMobil, the way many did over here with almost all the multinational corporations
And how allyuh environmental issues shaping up? According to Melinda Janki, one of your Environmental Impact Assessments warns that some 4000 barrels/68,000 gallons of sewage will be discharged every day into the ocean, adding up to an estimated 1.4 billion over a 40-year period — which the EPA argues will supposedly benefit the marine life. Also, what will be the environmental effects on fish and reefs if ballast water that ships coming to collect oil are discharged into the sea upon receiving their cargo? According to the International Maritime Organisation this ballast water is very harmful to marine life.
It’s illuminating how our respective Ministers of “education” couldn’t be bothered to direct civics and economics classes to highlight the existence of such legal fetters as the Investor State Dispute Settlement System (ISDS), the Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) and the International Centre for the Settlement of Investor Disputes (ICSIT). These empower private corporations to sue whole countries if the government’s policies of, say, environmental protection or land reform, infringes on their “investors rights.” Written into almost all “free” trade “agreements,” these choke off progressive governments policies and the sovereignty of countries often before the government takes office (which media house talks about any of this, much less connects it to violent crime?). Funny how it seems that it’s only now that that same ISDS is now starting to affect the middle classes from the same countries that created this system, that we are learning about it at all.
So we could continue to lock ourselves into these little silos, making stupid remarks as to who is Caribbean or not: that works well in favour of the sharks that are feeding off of all of us. Guyana, hear me well, I am not pretending that some of our officials have not treated you well in my country (for what it’s worth they treat many of us like crap too, it’s not a Guyanese thing, it’s a neocolonial power thing). At the basest level almost all of us are simply trying to win material benefits and live better and in peace as the late great anti-colonial Amilcar Cabral once said. But that means we still have to struggle as our parents and great-grandparents did — even against those who look like us who we have entrusted with political power. The imperatives that motivated the settling of this region by the West 500 years ago remain the same today, only greater. And as far as they are concerned the global division of labour they set up must be adhered to.
So it’s only by the working people collectively join forces are we going to even dream of dismantling the structures and institutions that render — and were deliberately intended to render — our various sovereignties the hollow farces they currently are. Take note how the people of Burkina Faso, Niger, Guinea, Mali and Gabon are dealing with almost identical issues, not to mention BRICS which, unsurprisingly, is almost an elephant in the CARICOM room; its almost completely absent from most public conversations in the media and in academic conferences in this region.
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