I am in full agreement with E. Naughton’s demand that the Government of Guyana “bring Guyana Goldfields to book” (Letters, KN 27/11/19) However, it should not stop there. The government needs to reign in all foreign capital and companies that have been running riot for too long in this country.
Those who refer to these corporate predators as ‘investors’, never ask the question – investing in whose interest? Truth be told, our Government’s ‘free for all attitude’ has turned the opportunity for foreign investment into an open invitation to plunder. Foreign capital tramples on the labour laws and sovereignty of this country, and successive governments, from the Hoyte administration through the Jagan and Jagdeo administrations, to the present Granger administration, have allowed them to get away with it. The only time Guyana displayed the courage and patriotic fervor to stand up to foreign capital was during the years of the Burnham administration.
Only last week, at the opening ceremony of the 2019 Guyana International Petroleum Exhibition (GIPEX), Senior Vice President, Upstream Oil and Gas Deep Water, Hunter Farris, publicly stated that the company remains steadfast in its commitment to begin developing a third oil field in the Stabroek Block. In his keynote address, he declared “we remain committed to bringing ‘Prosperity’ online as early as 2023”. He brazenly announced this time frame, despite the fact that the Government of Guyana has placed this Field Development Plan on hold on advice from the Department of Energy (DoE) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We are looking more and more like a ‘captured state’ every day.
It is time for real nationalists to stand up to this ‘confounded nonsense’. We must end the tragic state of affairs that has our people wallowing in poverty while their national patrimony is looted.
Gerald A. Perreira
Organization for the Victory of the people