Mornin'.
I had me cup of tea. I read de paper. And I want to walk through three things wid you, because somethin’ not quite addin’ up, and I’m tryin’ to figure out where I went wrong.
Maybe you can help me.
De first thing.
Kaieteur News, today’s edition. Headline tellin’ me dat Guyana waived US$525 million in taxes for ExxonMobil in 2025. One year. Five hundred and twenty-five million United States dollars. Waived.
Now. I am a regular man. I went to de market last week. I bought a bag of rice. I paid VAT on de rice. Fourteen percent. On a bag of rice. I didn’t get any waiver.
So I am sittin’ here wid my tea, tryin’ to do de arithmetic. De company makin’ billions of dollars in profit pay zero on dat slice. De woman at de market sellin’ eddoes pay tax on de eddoes. De same country. Different rules. And somebody, somewhere, decided dat de difference was correct.
I am not sayin’ dey wrong. I am sayin’ I don’t understand. And when I don’t understand somethin’, I usually find out dat de explanation has been left out for a reason.
De second thing.
Same paper, different page. Five Cabinet ministers flew offshore on April 17 to tour de ONE GUYANA FPSO. Dat’s de big floatin’ production vessel pumpin’ 250,000 barrels a day. De ministry release name dem all — Bharrat, Walrond, Indar, Griffith, Todd. Dey got de tour. Dey got de safety vests. Dey got de photographs.
Now I been thinkin’ about dis tour all morning.
What was de purpose of de tour?
I am askin’ as somebody who used to work in operations. When five senior people from a customer organization come to inspect a vendor’s facility, you go because you checkin’ somethin’. You go because somethin’ need to be checked. You go because you need to observe wid your own eyes how a thing is operatin'.
What did dey check? What did dey observe? What did dey learn? What changed because of de visit?
I read de release three times. I cyaa find de answer. De release just say de tour happened, de ministers were there, de tour was comprehensive. Nothing about what de tour was for.
So either dey checked somethin’ and didn’t tell us — which is fine, some things is internal. OR dey didn’t check anythin’, and de purpose of de tour was de tour itself.
If is de second one — and I’m not sayin’ it is, I’m just askin’ — den de question becomes: whose helicopter? Whose fuel? Whose time? And dat helicopter time, fuel, and ministerial salary is comin’ out of somebody’s budget. Was it ours?
I dunno. De release didn’t say.
De third thing.
Dis one I been chewin’ on for a while. Glenn Lall — de man who own Kaieteur News — write a piece yesterday sayin’ Exxon’s effective share of profit oil work out to about 87.5%. De government dispute de number. Independent analysts have published various counts.
I am not a petroleum economist. I cyaa do dat math. But here’s what I notice.
We been pumpin’ commercial oil out de Stabroek Block since 2019. Six years. Six years of production. Six budget cycles. And in dose six years, nobody in de government has ever — not one time — published a clean, simple, citizen-readable accountin’ of: “Here’s how many barrels we sold, here’s de price, here’s our share, here’s what we got, here’s where it went.”
Just one paragraph. Six numbers. Plain English.
Six years.
Now. If de deal is fair, dat paragraph would be easy to write. De government would want to write it. Every quarter. Bold print. On de front page of every Ministry website. Because a fair deal is its own best defense.
But we don’t have de paragraph. What we have, instead, is a long, complicated argument about why de paragraph is hard to write. About PSA structures. About cost recovery. About how oil contracts is “industry standard.” About how de math is “more nuanced.”
I am a regular man. I bought rice last week. I paid VAT.
When somebody tell me a thing is “more nuanced” every time I ask a simple question, I start to wonder why de simple question keep gettin’ answered wid nuance. In my experience, nuance is what people reach for when de plain answer don’t help dem.
Dat’s my three things.
I’m not sayin’ anybody is corrupt. I’m not sayin’ any party is worse dan any other party. I been around long enough to know dat every government, every party, every administration eventually has a moment where de citizens have to sit down wid de paper and ask: “Wait. What just happened? And why nobody is explainin’ it?”
Dis is dat moment. Or one of dose moments. I lost count.
I’ll have my tea tomorrow.
I’ll read de paper tomorrow.
If de answer come tomorrow, I’ll let you know.
If it don’t come, I’ll ask de question again. Calmly. Like dis. Until somebody answer.
Same drum. Different beat.
Bro Winston, signin’ off.
Bro Winston is a fictional character — a thoughtful citizen sittin’ wid his tea and de paper, askin’ de uncomfortable questions calmly. The dramatic irony is in de gap between de things de papers report and de explanations de public is offered. The voice is skeptical everyman, not party operative.
Sources: Kaieteur News (April 28, 2026 — “Guyana waived US$525M in taxes for Exxon in 2025”; “Cabinet team tours Guyana’s largest FPSO”); Kaieteur News (April 27, 2026 — “Glenn Lall sounds alarm on Exxon’s ‘87.5% grab’”).