Give yourselves a fighting chance to become real citizens in your own country. Demand for the oil revenues to be paid out to you directly. If you so wish, you can then later hand it over to your government in taxes… but at least that way you make it clearer to your government that it works for you.
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There is no such thing as an oil-cursed politician, an oil-cursed government or an oil cursed policymaker, on the contrary they are all most often shining examples of the blessings of oil... there are only oil-cursed citizens... and therefore foremost we have to count on ourselves to free us from this curse.
Where I come from
I was named Diversification Manager in the Venezuela Investment Fund that was created in 1974 to handle the oil income surpluses of the nation.
I entered the Fund its very first day, and I left a couple of weeks later, the same day my desk arrived, utterly frustrated when the Fund was requested to analyze, and obviously endorse, in just four days, the economic feasibility studies of a 4 billion dollar investment known as the Fourth Plan of SIDOR, the big Venezuelan iron and steel complex.
I entered the Fund its very first day, and I left a couple of weeks later, the same day my desk arrived, utterly frustrated when the Fund was requested to analyze, and obviously endorse, in just four days, the economic feasibility studies of a 4 billion dollar investment known as the Fourth Plan of SIDOR, the big Venezuelan iron and steel complex.
With an “if something goes wrong with this project the Venezuelans might have the right to hang us in Plaza Bolívar, and I’m much too young for that” I slammed the door on the public sector … for the following 28 years... except for a short two year stint as an Executive Director in the World Bank.
I have lived through two immense oil revenue bonanzas in my country and I am absolutely convinced that when the oil revenues a government receives exceed 5% of the nations GDP, or 15% of its exports, or 25% of all taxes paid by citizens, the balance of power is so fundamentally affected that bad governance and bad citizenship becomes the major malignant symptoms of the oil-curse.
There is not one single word or idea that I hear today from politicians, or from well-intentioned groups of mostly non-oil-cursed professionals as in EITI or the Resource-Charter, and that I have not heard before with respect to making better use of oil revenues.
The only route to go is keeping the oil revenues from the politicians and giving these directly to the citizens in an orderly fashion.
Down with the Oiligarchs!
Let the oil revenues flow to the citizens!
Down with the Petrocrats!
Let the oil revenues flow to the citizens!
Kings and beggars
Oil revenues in the hands of whoever possesses the State makes for arrogant Kings and miser citizens beggars
In Venezuela
If you can read Spanish I invite you to follow my efforts to get my fellow citizens in Venezuela to forcefully request am oil-revenue sharing plan. This you can do on http://www.petropolitan.blogspot.com
21st Century Asocialism
Voices and documents:
“An Economic Manifesto for the Oil Exporting Countries of the Persian Gulf,” with F. Abbas, G. Jabbour and D. Kwon, Banca Nazionale Del Lavoro Quarterly Review, Vol. LIX, No. 239, December 2006”… “in our proposal the government would (in time) lose all access to oil revenues”.