–lest we lose corn and husk, warns YCG’s Dimitri Nicholson
GUYANESE need to put their differences aside and focus on measured performance, if we are to work on being mentally prepared for the imminent oil and gas industry, says Youth Challenge Guyana (YCG) Executive Director Dimitri Nicholson.
Nicholson believes that much of the discussion over Guyana’s oil and gas resources is not engendering solutions, but is instead leaving the country unprepared for the advent of a totally new industry.
“I think mentally, we’re not [prepared], because instead of having dialogue, we’re having not even a debate; a ‘buse out’ about things, and how to spend oil money,” Nicholson said, adding: “The nature of our debates are highly antagonistic.”
In an interview with the Guyana Chronicle on its Online programme, ‘Vantage Point’, Nicholson warned that if we’re not careful, caught up as we are with the fighting, the foreigners may very well end up being the ones to benefit more from our resources.
“We’re busy fighting against each other, and the immigrants coming here for jobs are going about business as usual. We are the ones who spend more time taken up by our entanglement with each other over what we should do with the oil money. Rather than a constructive debate, constructive forum of consultations, there is just antagonism against each other. So I don’t think we are mentally prepared,” Nicholson noted.
He cautioned that with all the oil and gas discussions going on, persons should be careful of how they accept information without fact-checking for themselves.
“There are so many people talking; everybody turn an oil and gas expert over the last month. So Guyana has more oil-and -gas experts now than countries that have oil for more than 100 years,” Nicholson said, adding:
“But the challenge is: Who will you listen to; who will be a reliable source. One of the things to do is when you hear information, try to find out for yourself what is the source, and compare it to companies that might have more expertise in this area.”
YOUTH AWARENESS
The YCG is currently putting much focus on youths and getting them aware of how to position themselves for jobs in the oil-and- gas sector.
“The nature of our debates are highly antagonistic, so that doesn’t help our young people to sink their teeth into information,” Nicholson said. “Rather, when they hear and see information, they hear the anger and resentment of the authors rather than the message,” he added.
YCG, in collaboration with the Guyana Oil and Gas Association and the African Cultural and Development Association (ACDA) recently held a youth-focused Oil and Gas Seminar in Georgetown.
The seminar saw a presentation by prominent attorney-at-law Nigel Hughes, who stressed that even as Guyana works on its local-content policy, the necessary human resources may not be there for stipulations on the amount of Guyanese that should be employed by oil-and-gas companies.
“So we have to think more about how do we position ourselves more to benefit from the oil-and-gas sector,” Nicholson said, adding:
“The country is going to change a whole lot, and the people who will be mostly affected are young people, while they may not have the resources to adjust themselves. As the economy changes, those cultures are going to change, so it’s going to impact them as well. Their desire for money is going to be great, because prices are going to go up, and as a young person, you might not want to be left behind when your friends are working with this company and that company, and you’re not working because you did not prepare yourself. So those things are going to impact us.”
He said that over the past year, too much focus and resources were put on other aspects, and took away from vital focus that is needed for developing our oil and gas-readiness.
“There’s almost a year of nothing happening, and therefore the kind of structural adjustment that we would’ve needed for the legal framework, the window for that is about to close until after the elections,” he said, adding: “The challenge I have with that is that we can still put the things that we need to put in place while we have differences. We need to know how to put our differences aside to work for a particular goal. And that is the mental maturity that we don’t have; and time is winding down.”
He believes what is lacking is a structured plan, with goals and measured progress in achieving those goals.
“If we had a flow chart of things that needed to be done by when; we have what percentage of those things are done by now; how much of it requires parliament; how much of it is policy changes; how much of it is administrative changes. Those are things that would help us to understand as a nation how we are, the apparatus for those things are weak,” he said.
