Is the ‘resource curse’ resonating over our oil and gas sector?

More than five years after bursting into the global oil & gas spotlight following the discovery by a consortium led by the US oil giant ExxonMobil of an excess of 8 billion barrels of oil off the country’s coast, the Guyanese populace as a whole still know shockingly little about the industry as a whole or about when or how the country will be impacted by the returns from a sector which we are told will remove the country from the condition of impoverishment in which it has been caught fast for more than half a century.
 The initial euphoria and the dissemination of pipe dreams that envisaged miraculous economic transformations and even the distribution of lump sums of liquid cash to the populace as a whole have been shifted discreetly to the back burner, the focus of attention now settling on issues ranging from oil & gas-linked major foreign investment and local content spinoffs for Guyanese enterprises, to speculation as to whether after all, we are not destined to be held on a leash for quite a while longer, before the windfall comes.
 Since the removal of the Head of the Department of Energy Dr Mark Bynoe from his post early in December, a development that had been projected by Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo just days prior, it would appear that Jagdeo himself has been running the oil & gas ‘show’.

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