READ this quote below taken from the website of July 29, 2023 of an entity named OGGN (Oil and Gas Governance Network) operated by people who have lived all their lives outside of Guyana and may ( I say “may”) never have contributed a cent to a nursery school or a section of the Georgetown Hospital.
I quote: “In the summer of 2017, OGGN was created as a legitimate non-profit organization located in Hollis, New York, United States. OGGN’s mission is to advocate for the rule of law, transparency, good governance, and accountability with respect to oil exploration and production in Guyana.
“This is best achieved by effective legislation, regulations, and procedures, codes of practice, monitoring and public reporting systems developed in close consultation with all relevant stakeholders in Guyana.”

I find it inscrutable that a group of Guyanese who all may be citizens of foreign countries and do not contribute to the contents of Guyana in anyway, has organised themselves to speak on behalf of the population here. Well, that may not be a caricature in itself but it becomes a caricature when that body never consulted Guyanese who live here about if we want them to represent us.

I have been a columnist going on to 35 consecutive years and no one from OGGN has ever asked me about its intention to represent Guyanese living here. No one from OGGN has ever consulted the thousands of Guyanese I have contacts with inside the spheres of journalism, academia, medicine, law, business, teaching, etc….
I know of no one from these areas of life who have said to me, “Frederick, a man named Andre Brandli or a woman named Janette Bulkan has contacted me about forming a group in New York to represent Guyanese to ensure the Guyana Government gets a better deal from EXXON.”

So who does OGGN speak for? But let’s stick with the caricatured canvas. Here is the lopsided mentality of OGGN.
I quote again; “Guyana’s oil and gas reserve should be managed under the same stringent environmental protection standards of the US and the European Union.”
You see the Eurocentric/colonial mind at work here. There is no mention of Russia whose oil and gas industry is larger than the combined industry of the US and EU. There is no mention of Saudi Arabia.

These are the people that say they speak for us here in Guyana. And you can bet your last dollar that they will not apologise for leaving out Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other top oil-producing countries in the Third World.
The same set of people in OGGN signed a letter along with other expatriate Guyanese, published in the Stabroek News of November 17, 2022, demanding that Guyana get out of the fossil fuel industry.

In that letter they argued that the fossil fuel industry is a threat to civilization and boldly added the irrelevancy that civilization originated in Africa. Then barefacedly went on to inform, we the “ignorant” readers that greenhouse emissions kill African people.

Before I read that letter, I thought that, like tobacco, greenhouse emission is harmful to all humans, not only Africans. I leave it to readers to analyse the Freudian mind at work through the mention of African people only and the subterranean message intended.
Let’s have more quotes from the July 29, 2023 publication: “Collectively, they have years of experience in business, industry, research, and/or academia. All of OGGN’s directors work on a pro bono basis for the benefit of all Guyanese.” Five questions arise here:
1 – These people with their years of experience have given their skills to which countries and Guyana is included?
2- How long these experienced people lived in other foreign lands?
3- If they do not work on a pro-bono basis, then who in Guyana or elsewhere they expect to pay them for writing about Guyana’s oil industry while living in some place named Hollis in the United States?
4- Where are the benefits OGGN bring to Guyana? Who in Guyana knows OGGN? Who in Guyana ever heard about a Guyanese in Germany named Andre Brandli (as I wrote in my Tuesday piece, it sounds like Bruce Lee.
5- Is any of the OGGN people coming back to live among us? Janet Bulkan teaches in a very cold part of the world – British Columbia. Brandli teaches in Germany. The other OGGN people are happily ensconced in foreign lands. I will continue this exposure of OGGN by looking at its subtle support for anti-government causes like its rush to criticise the police for ignoring non-existential threats to Red Thread and its accusation that Joel Bhagwandin has to sing for his supper. Which supper I am singing for?