MELINDA Janki in a eulogy of recently departed activist, Ramon Gaskin, said he, “looked at the oil curse in the face and spat at it.”
I live in Guyana, and unlike Janki who has British papers and Gaskin that had Canadian papers, I know what has been going on in Guyana in the days when Janki went to the UK and Gaskin went to Canada.
I would like to think I am a fairly educated man and I will now say at the expense of being described as an incompetent academic, I don’t know what is meant by the oil curse.

I would be happy for someone to describe what the discovery of oil does for a nation and why an industry that has an export market like hundreds of other industries becomes useless to a country that it becomes a curse.

More than 100 years, the Rupununi Development Corporation established the world’s largest cattle ranch, Dadanawa, taking in 1,700 square miles. That length and width take in all the small islands of the Caribbean plus Singapore. In my studies of Guyanese history I never heard that the export of cattle from Guyana became a curse.

In 1887, British Guiana (BG) exported almost 12,000 ounces of gold and since that time, Guyana has had a successful gold export industry. I have never read where politicians and academics refer to the curse of the gold industry. British Guiana became an exporter of rice and a huge exporter of sugar since the 19th century onwards and no one referred to those export industries as a curse.

Guyana thrived on the success of the sugar industry where any and everything in Guyana was bound up with “King Sugar.” The sugar industry benefitted the British Empire immensely but it played a significant and prodigious role in securing Guyana from being close to the social chasm. In all my reading on Guyana’s political economy and sociology, I never came across the term “the sugar curse.”

There was a relentless demand for Guyana’s bauxite that, in 1943, production expanded tremendously from 476,000 tonnes to 1,902,000 tonnes. During the Second World War, Guyana bauxite was used in almost 70 per cent of aircraft manufacturing in the West.

After the war, Guyana’s economy rested on sugar and bauxite. From the 1940s onward Guyana’s GDP and GNP were higher than Malaysia and Singapore. No one in those days right up to Independence referred to the rice curse, the gold curse, the bauxite curse, the sugar curse. What then is this oil curse that Ramon Gaskin spat on as described by Janki?

I cannot answer that, but I believe the term is a Eurocentric one that is part of the long historical narrative of the West to insult the non-White world best described in Edward Said’s brilliant anti-colonial book, “Orientalism.”

Gaskin in his entire life claimed he was a Leninist but he lived his entire life without any Leninist input. Testimony to that is his spitting on a vital industry, the oil industry, which, according to Professor Clive Thomas, will contribute expansively to the reduction of poverty in this land.

So the oil curse goes like this. The Third World has discovered this money-spinning industry that will destroy the countries that have it because its strangulating tentacles will corrupt and destroy society and government. That is how the West sees the oil industry in the Third World. But here is where Gaskin was ignorant of the meaning of Leninism. The West invented the term “the oil curse” because through the incredible earnings of the oil industry, the Global South could compete with the West.

Former President, Donald Ramotar told me he was convinced that the anti- laundering regime was imposed on the Global South by the West to serve the interests of the West. Just take one example. It is a billion times easier to do a bank transaction in any Western country than in Third World countries whose economies are aligned to the West.

Nazim Baksh, who worked for 30 years with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as an investigative journalist and now attached to DPI in Guyana wrote last week in his Chronicle column of the hassles he endured to open a simple bank account in Guyana.

I cannot repeat here what Baksh told me of his nightmare, but as he spoke, I remember what President Ramotar told me about the imposition of the anti-money laundering Act.

People like the 42 names that signed a November 13, 2022 letter in the Stabroek News demanded an immediate cessation of oil production, Melinda Janki and Ramon Gaskin that spat on the oil industry, were are incapable of understanding how the global economy works. But it is our job to keep writing hoping they will learn.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.