REACTING to a hurricane of negative statements being made by the Opposition, a coalition supporter advised: “Don’t worry wid dem, PM”. As I looked at her, she added: “They speaking wid forked tongue”!
When a person is accused of speaking with a forked tongue, that person is said to be hypocritical, duplicitous and misleading. The statements by that person would be riddled with half-truths, falsehoods and distortions. It is hard to believe someone who speaks with a forked tongue.

FULL DISCLOSURE
Take, for example, the statement by the leader of the opposition that Guyana will be “worse off” when production of oil and gas begins, and afterwards. Is this an example of someone speaking with a “forked tongue”?
The prospect of Guyana becoming the new frontier of oil and gas production and, by inference, a potentially wealthy country, has become everyone’s dream, everyone’s hope. But only the leader of the opposition, in typical gloom-and-doom fashion, harbours a dreaded nightmare of Guyanese walking around with begging bowls, or starving, even as oil would be flowing abundantly.

Our Government has committed to transparency and has spent, so far, almost the entire two years of its life in tapping into every possible technical source available for a model framework to ensure that Guyana could benefit from our petroleum resources. Even before any big “find” was made, then Minister of Governance, Raphael Trotman, (now Minister of Natural Resources) and I were doing the initial rounds in Mexico for assistance to craft the legal framework and to help train Guyanese in petroleum engineering.
Much has been done since to strengthen the legal infrastructure to deal with possible corrupt practices, and to build partnerships that could promote environmentally safe exploration and production. Our Government has partnered with a multi-stakeholders’ movement that has a defined watch-dog role to ensure there is accountability and transparency in our extractive industries.

We have explained the need to build institutions and systems that would guide Guyana away from the pitfalls that had made the oil sector in some countries into what has been described as a “resource curse.” All indications are that life in Guyana will be improved once we start to pump oil and channel gas into the homes and factories of Guyanese.
But we have to make room for the spirit crushers in our midst, who would rather hand over a channel leading to our marine deposits to a greedy neighbour, than revel in satisfaction that Guyana could be better off when we ourselves harvest our petroleum resources.
The opposition leader claimed that two per cent royalty is a rip off. But Mr. Forked Tongue did not say that under his (PPP) government, the royalty that was negotiated was one half of a per cent!

Then, he screamed that Government should release the contract with Exxon-Mobil. Did he publish the 1999 Agreement and when? Perhaps there were legal impediments that had stood in the way. Could it have been the amendments to the Petroleum Act which were introduced in 1997 by the then Government to place restrictions on disclosure of information? Surely, he should tell the whole story, truthfully.

SKELDON SHUT DOWN
The Opposition has decided to wage a hurricane of protests in the sugar belt. They are wagging the same old forked tongue by claiming that (a) the coalition was shutting down the sugar industry and (b) the sugar industry, as is, could be returned to profitability.
They have shut out repeated explanations, and buried an entire White Paper on the plight of the sugar industry. The sugar industry is not being closed. It requires a process of merger of operations, together with divestment and diversification, to save sugar and protect jobs for as many workers as possible. Sugar would be restricted to three factories and five cultivation areas on three estates. GuySuCo will retain its core operations and will produce an anticipated 150,000 tonnes of sugar.

The sugar industry is in deep crisis. Those who are today speaking with forked tongues have themselves presided over the bankruptcy of the industry. They have left it with a debt tag of some $85 billion. The industry is on a life-line that is feeding on subsidies or bailouts, with some $32 billion pumped into it over the past two years. That was enough to give every sugar worker a bonus package of $2 million, on top of wages!
The years of neglect and mismanagement of the industry, together with political interference, have to be placed at the feet of the Jagdeo-Ramotar administrations.

Mr. Jagdeo pumped $47billion into the Skeldon factory, which is a notorious white elephant. He had said that without modernisation of that factory, sugar would be dead. He was right.
On June 9, a post-mortem revealed that the factory was defective at the time it was handed over by the contractors, without any certification. A critical part of the factory was the co-generation plant which had safety and design issues. A study stated that it would cost US$17 million to fix the problem. That would be another G$3.4 billion.

What the Opposition has not admitted, is that factory closure and merger of estate operations had started during the Jagdeo terms. Lands that should have gone to sugar workers or put under other crops in the much long-promised diversification and other “turn-around plans”, were hived off to friends and cronies. Yet, with a forked tongue, these folks would tell the very sugar workers, whom they have left exposed and vulnerable, that they could save sugar!

TERM LIMIT
And, finally, there is this sore issue of term limits for presidential office. President Cheddi Jagan had championed limitation to two terms. I believe that both Mr. Ralph Ramkarran and I who were assigned leading roles in the constitutional reform processes, followed the advice of Dr. Jagan, who died before we concluded our work. During 1999, the then general-secretary submitted a proposal from the PPP that limited presidential service to two consecutive terms.

It was written into the reformed Constitution, but that did not stop Mr. Jagdeo from vilifying Ramkarran for allegedly butchering his chance for a third term.
An attempt was made at the PPP’s 2008 Congress to promote a third term for Mr. Jagdeo, but it became a damp squib. So, when he mounts his hope or to borrow the word of one commentator, “salivates” for a third term, he must know that that has long been pronounced a dead issue. Indeed, his prediction of Guyana being worse off could become true if he ever gets a third term.