International experts have warned Guyana on several occasions that, without consensus, key laws like those governing the Natural Resource Fund (NRF) would be doomed to a cycle of failure. Nonetheless, the Coalition Government has pressed ahead from the draft stage to the time the NRF law came to be without the political opposition’s input.
As such, Oil and Gas Consultant and attorney-at-law, Charles Ramson Jr., has pronounced that the development of Guyana’s oil sector would not be a harmonious one. The lawyer said too that, with the lack of consensus, one can conclude that Guyana’s NRF may already be sentenced to failure.
During a brief interview with the Guyana Standard, Ramson said, “The process that they used to pass the law governing the Fund is destructive towards a harmonious development of the oil and gas sector in Guyana…They created a Green Paper without the opposition’s involvement, tabled a bill without our comments, and then passed it without having a single debate on it. No parliamentary opposition will want to participate in a process where committee members have to be selected to oversee the Fund and they were excluded from the beginning.”
Just last week, Opposition Leader, Bharrat Jagdeo, announced that should the PPP win the next General and Regional Elections, the NRF would be subject to significant changes.
During an interview with radio personality, Stan Gouveia, on 94.1 Boom FM, Jagdeo said he does not agree with the current model for the Fund.
In this regard, he said, “We want to change the model because the Finance Minister [Winston Jordan] is responsible through Central Bank for the Fund and he appoints key committees that will be in charge of it such as the Macroeconomic and Investment committees.”
With such a structure in place that sees the Finance Minister having so much influence, Jagdeo believes that the Fund will end up being just another slush fund for the Government. That is not going to happen under the PPP, he had said.
