Column 200: Sovereignty in the Age of Oil

(Kaieteur News) – The series began on May 26, 2017 as Oil and gas – The New Economic Horizon and was expected to run for twenty-five weeks. As the research deepened, it became Road to First Oil – Every Man, Woman and Child Must Become Oil-Minded, borrowing the Daily Chronicle exhortation brought to my attention by historian Dr. Nigel Westmaas. Twenty-five columns became fifty, then one hundred, and this is number 200. I can feel cramp setting in.

That first column identified the legislative framework, taxation, corruption, the Sovereign Wealth Fund and the border controversy with Venezuela. It also recalled Cheddi Jagan’s 1986 warning against giving oil companies a “blank cheque” and putting Guyana’s independence and energy policies in the hands of transnationals. Nearly nine years later, Venezuela has moved from the margins to the centre, touching our territory, security, relationship with the United States and even the value of our petroleum. The question now is larger: how sovereign is Guyana in the age of oil?

In 1939, while British Guiana was still a colony, petroleum legislation vested the country’s petroleum resources in the State. The Petroleum Activities Act 2023 repeats the principle. In law, the petroleum is ours, but legal ownership should not be confused with effective sovereignty. Cheddi Jagan understood that danger. As Leader of the Opposition in 1986, he warned against putting Guyana’s independence and energy policies in the hands of the transnationals. Yet thirteen years later, the PPP Government under President Janet Jagan signed the 1999 Petroleum Agreement with Esso. No one then knew the scale of the Stabroek resource, but the irony is unavoidable: the party that warned against surrendering energy policy to transnationals entered the agreement that became the foundation for ExxonMobil’s dominant role.