Dear Editor,
The BBC was once a revered national institution in Great Britain – the voice of authority, the voice of independent and impartial news reporting. That has long gone.
The BBC is in Guyana to promote an oil wealth narrative, which they have been doing since 2019 when Simon Maybin visited Guyana and produced items on the BBC’s website about oil wealth while portraying Guyanese as poor and backward. I complained to the BBC that Maybin continued the patronising colonial narrative of poor Africans hoping for low-skilled jobs. Maybin barely acknowledged Guyana’s rich ethnic diversity beyond remarking on the smell of curry in Georgetown. The BBC’s response to my complaint was dismissive but strangely, the photo of a small Afro-Guyanese boy in a dirty singlet with a snotty nose has disappeared from Maybin’s article along with other material. Perhaps the BBC will deny that it ever existed?
For people like us, the BBC is not a source of truth but a promoter of propaganda. A report in 2024 by DeSmog, a well-established investigative journalist outlet, showed that the BBC had, “produced dozens of films and articles for oil and gas companies, agricultural giants, fossil fuel states, and high-emission transport firms in recent years.” Until a few years ago, the BBC pretended there was doubt over the global warming impacts of greenhouse gas pollution from the fossil fuel industry, despite over 100 years of unchallengeable science (some of it produced by ExxonMobil and Shell) and over 30 years of international law including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change which Guyana has signed.
You can only portray Guyana as the “fastest growing economy in the world” if you are ignorant of modern economics or dishonest. First the GDP figures for Guyana include the value of the oil extracted by Exxon and co-venturers which they do not buy from Guyana but get for free. That oil amounts to 87.5% of Guyana’s oil, or rather 87.5% of what is left of Guyana’s oil after Exxon and co-venturers have taken as much free oil as they want for their operations. Second, GDP is outdated. GDP counts the destruction of the natural world as ‘development’. Even the World Bank uses a different measurement which puts a monetary value on the loss of that natural capital. If the government was keeping proper accounts of the financial impacts of oil, they would have to identify all of the natural capital that is lost through oil production (loss of fisheries, deaths of cetaceans and other marine life, destruction of mangroves, air pollution, noise pollution, light pollution, chemical pollution, thermal pollution of the ocean etc.) every year. The government would have to retain a natural capital expert to put a monetary value on that annual loss and deduct it from Guyana’s comparatively paltry oil revenue. There is no oil windfall.
The BBC asks whether this non-existent windfall will be fairly
distributed among the population. They do not appear to be interested in the truth. The panel does not have anybody who is representative of those Guyanese who cannot afford to feed their children, buy medicine, pay for transportation, or live a life of dignity because of the rising cost of living associated with oil and the influx of wealthy expatriates here to get richer.