By Imran Khan

XENOPHOBIA – a fear of foreigners or strangers from the Greek for Xeno, a guest, stranger, foreigner and phobia meaning fear or hatred.

Guyana has long had both warmth towards, and a deep, and at times justifiable, suspicion of foreigners. As a result of our difficult history, we have also been blighted by our own, sometimes debilitating insecurities and self-doubt. In the case of our suspicion of foreigners, our former colonial masters brought many of our ancestors to these shores, either through the compulsion of slavery or the deceit of indentureship. Amerindians were the original casualties of invading Europeans. And in post-colonial politics, it was necessary to warn against the Westerner who wanted to wrest control of small, newly liberated countries and use them as pawns in the Cold War. Guyana is not unique in that sense and it could be said to have gotten off lightly compared to others in Latin America, where hundreds of thousands were killed in externally provoked civil wars. The scars still linger, here and elsewhere.

However, the recent trend of antipathy that is emerging in the media and on social media is both disturbing and indicative of our historical insecurities and self-doubt, which we are yet to exorcise. ExxonMobil has received the brunt of this suspicion, but it is not alone. China has also been brought in for criticism with media reports warning that they will bankrupt the country with wasteful infrastructural projects. Chinese entrepreneurs are also portrayed as taking over Regent Street with (unverified) claims of selling smuggled goods.
Now we are being told that the MoU signed on Wednesday with our fellow CARICOM member Trinidad and Tobago, will facilitate their takeover of our new oil and gas sector, a view that President David Granger said was “fearmongering” and Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley called disappointing.

There’s a trend here, isn’t there?

From whence did this current wave of xenophobia originate? Your average Guyanese – farmer, fisherman, vendor – has little interest in cultivating and promulgating such threats. In fact, many Guyanese might have visited or have relatives living in Trinidad. They are hardly afraid. Any enmity between our two nations is limited to CPL T20 battles, and whether it’s chicken curry or curry chicken (it’s chicken curry by the way). In fact, one of the best examples of our brotherhood as people is the annual Duck Curry Competition in which Guyana constantly prevails, and even Trinidadians admit it is because ours tastes way better (could the secret be the Indi Special Madras Curry Powder?).

Truth be told, a lot of the fearmongering we see in the media comes from a certain politically directed and self-absorbed, insecure quarter of the private sector. After all, it was the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) that was first to call for a hold on the MoU with Trinidad, despite not having even read it.

“It could mean the end of the private sector,” President Deodat Indar declared wildly.
These politically directed private sector operatives had previously criticised the ExxonMobil contract without fully understanding or even reading it. The truth is that this small group of myopic business-sector operatives and leaders, suffer from a small-minded parochialism that looks to protect their minute territory from external competition. They prefer to talk about this in the language of local jobs or local content, but it is really about protecting their own profits, and to a lesser extent, their social status.

Meanwhile, there are progressive entrepreneurs in Guyana who are getting on with the business of elevating their standards and becoming globally competitive. They do not always seek to hog the newspaper headlines of influence on social media discussions, but they are quietly working and building partnerships and markets internationally.

It is time this fearmongering is stopped. This will only come about with an understanding among our people that Guyana no longer needs to play the victim. Those days of taking whatever we can get are over. We are sitting on four billion barrels and counting of oil reserves. Within a few years, we will be a significant world oil producer, with hitherto unthinkable revenues that will truly transform this economy and this country.
Even chief critic Chris Ram says the government will receive 80 per cent of its revenues from oil within 10 years. As such, we need partners to help us with this transformation, starting with ExxonMobil, whose breathtaking skills at discovering (and extracting) that oil makes it an ideal and reliable partner.

Of course, they are not doing it for free and they are not some altruistic saviour. No one has ever claimed that. It is simply that our interests and goals are broadly aligned, and it is therefore to our benefit to work with them constructively to ensure both Guyana and the oil major receive maximum revenues from monetising our reserves.

China too, can help build the badly needed infrastructure, be it a new bridge across the Demerara and Essequibo rivers, a deep-water harbour or completion of the highway to Brazil. The skills, energy and cost efficiencies they bring to such projects throughout the world are staggering. As for our brothers and sisters in Trinidad and Tobago, who is better than our own Caribbean people to provide the technical expertise and capital to build our new oil and gas sector?

Indeed, we should welcome them or else they will simply provide support to offshore operations from their own shore bases. As Elvis Presley warned, “We can’t build our dreams on suspicious minds.” It is time to thrive. We must become a more secure and confident people looking for opportunities and partnerships. That is how we will grow as a people and an economy.