 Good evening, everyone. My name is Akola Gwek, and I'm the host of the show tonight. I take this opportunity to thank Town Meeting TV for hosting us tonight. Tonight, we are going to have a discussion on Sosu Dan, specifically on the LEAPS experience and professional experience of my colleague here, Chiang Kwan Mabil Magyok. During this discussion, we will be talking about his professional experience having worked in Sosu Dan for 10 years, specifically in the oil sector. If my experience, my own educational experience is to be a guide, we look specifically at the geopolitics of energy and political economy of oil and mineral resources. And in this area, we have to look at how the oil economy has operated in Sosu Dan over the past 16 or 15 years and how the LEAPS experience or professional experience of Chiang Kwan Mabil Magyok can inform us in understanding what the oil sector is. And so, without further ado, I will introduce my guest tonight. Chiang Kwan Mabil Magyok is the host tonight. Chiang Kwan came to Burma in 2003, went to the University of Burma in 2004, got a degree in economics, and also went again to graduate school at Brandeis University School of International Studies or International Business School, and got a master's degree in economics. And then he went to Sosu Dan and worked as a consultant for Deloitte for a while and then transitioned into Nile Pet. And worked Nile Pet is Sosu Dan Public Oil Company, and Chiang Kwan has been there for a while. And he has decided to come back to Burma and go to graduate school and get a P.A.D. in economics. So I will welcome you, Chiang Kwan, to the show. This is, how many days are you in Burma now? Two days, less than a week. Four or five. Four or five days. So welcome back to Burma, welcome to the University of Burma, and welcome to the studio here. So the floor is yours, exactly. I will have questions at the end, but the floor is yours to say whatever you want to say to Burmantes and our audience around the world. Welcome. Well, thank you, Ako. It is obviously good to be back to Burma. This is a place that pick us up from the refugee scam. And it has been a long way. We have, you know, obviously grown. We came here as adults. We were not teenagers at the time. But yeah, it has been a journey, and Burma has always been a home. You know, people here have made it home for us. And so wherever you have been, you know, especially someone like myself, you know, I left Burma in 2012, and I went to Massachusetts for school. And then, although I have come back a few times, you know, for a night or two, but then I have, you know, for the two years I was in Boston, I have gone back. And then from Boston, you know, I got into the job market, and the next thing I know I was in Africa. You know, it was my goal at the time. And I spent the last few years in Africa, you know, mostly in South Sudan. You know, a few times in East Africa, which obviously was my goal. And it has been a great experience. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So if we could go into questions very quickly, is to pass you a question about the oil economy. Generally, you will be specific about South Sudan, but generally speaking, having worked for an oil company, how does the oil sector operate, generally, from when the oil is taken from the ground to the market to when actually the money is received? Thank you, Akal. That is a very good question. Oil sector, you know, obviously is very general, you know, because there is heavy oil, and then there is the gas part of it. And for the area that I have worked in, you know, obviously was a national petroleum company. And there are three parts to it. Oil sector, you know, obviously involved three areas, which is the downstream and midstream, and then the upstream. Now, if you break it down, downstream, you know, mostly deal with the supply of the final products to the market. And that is like, you know, like, you know, kind of bringing the final product to the gas stations like what we have here, that is mostly, you know, downstream is on distribution. Upstream, for the most part, you know, deal with the sales, sales of the oil. And it is given the complications of the global energy. It is one of those areas that is very political in Asia. And then, of course, that is midstream, all right? Midstream, you know, is where I came from and where I have spent, you know, a good number of my years. Midstream mostly has expects that are helping, you know, making sure that the upstream and the downstream, you know, function. And so, in my case, I was, you know, involved pretty much in finance and internal audit, you know, and that is making sure, you know, that the system is working, you know, that the kind of software that you will need are in place, you know, but what I could say is that oil, you know, as a component is kind of, it is one of those products that can be good and can be bad, especially if not managed very well. And I don't think, you know, we have done a very good job managing our oil resources. Thank you. So, in that regard, oil at these three sectors and you are in the midstream, what I'm trying to, you know, I have not been inside this area to be able or any other audience watching us tonight is to say, when people say, for example, when people are talking about, you know, pipeline, for example, and there was a road between Sudan and South Sudan and the contract or the agreement that was signed and so forth, the owner of the pipeline, the owner of the oil, how does that operate in terms of who gained, who wins, who had the power over whom? Right, yeah. Thank you, Kof. You know, when we went to school for economics, you know, there was always this common say, you know, that in a free market, you know, all players benefit, right? Yes. That is kind of true on the surface, but then deeply, especially when you go to the details of what goes into all that effort, in a way someone has to benefit more than the other person and so for our case, you know, for South Sudan, we are a landlocked country and our complication, you know, became harder in the sense that with the oil sector, we realized when we became a country that there were some agreements that were done already and so we became part of the agreement. It's like you are a country, but then there are some things, some red tape that you cannot... You cannot touch. You cannot touch and you cannot put your hands into it and so what happened, you know, somewhere I think in the 1990s, you have a good number of oil companies, mostly from Asia, that, you know, that were, you know, given rights, you know, to drill, especially in, you know, some parts of the Great Upper Nile where you and I come from and so what happened was the oil technically from the South, it is being drilled in the South and then it goes into the pipe, all right, and that pipe takes oil, you know, somewhere, you know, in South Sudan, especially in, you know, what we now call the Upper Nile and, you know, parts of Unity State and the Ruin Administrative Area and so that oil goes into the pipe and it goes all the way, you know, to Khartoum and then from Khartoum now, it has to go to Pot, all right, where, you know, the Pot is kind of where all these international, you know, how do you call them, you know, in our basic language, we could call them trucks. Trucks or these cargoes, those cargoes, exactly that is the right word, you know, and so they would come and kind of pick it up from there. It goes into some of those silos or whatever that you used to store, the liquid and then it would go into some of these, you know, some of these waterways and that is when it goes for sale. It can technically be sold when it is underground, you know, but for the most part, you know, for us, it was sold when it is still underground, all right, and in Pot Sudan, you know, you have the refinery where the oil is kind of, you know, kind of separated now, that is the dirt and then the part of it which, you know, which is kind of goes into water and then you get the final product out of that. Now for us, it was trick in the sand, you know, that while the oil is produced in the South, it has to somewhat go to Pot Sudan, which is technically a different country before the final product, you know, comes back to the market. So in a sense, you could have a car in South Sudan and you are sitting on an oil, but then there is no way you can get that oil and put it onto your tank. Yeah, so it has been a complicated process. Some steps were taken by the government of South Sudan, you know, in a way, you know, to make sure that because the distant, you know, where the oil flows from South Sudan to North Sudan and to the Pot Sudan, it's kind of a long distance. What a distance for us is through East Africa, especially through Mombasa. There were also some proposals that it could be done through Eritrea, right? Both distances are short, but then there were some challenges, you know, a lot of them political in Asia, you know, and we were thinking that if the country was stable, you know, from 2011 to 2022, we feel like it would have been done, and stability came in three years into independence. I kind of feel like, you know, we didn't give ourselves a chance to develop our own sources so that we can benefit from it. And so to go back to your questions on who benefits, you know, from the fees and all that, the estimates, you know, obviously around 2012, you know, or it could have been way before that. Sudan, you know, being the country that helped, you know, that helped Sudan go through and the pipelines are there as well. You know, they kind of tied some of those minor pipes to the main pipes. So they actually steeled the oil as it closed. It was being sipped off. And yeah, for the years that I have been there, I have tried my best to find whether we have anyone that was, you know, kind of monitoring, you know, the point of production, you know, to... To what arrived at the port? To what arrived at the port. And there was nobody? I have not found anyone yet. Now, let's let me get back to this. Who are the consumers of source Sudan oil? It is... What country actually buys source Sudan oil? It is, it is, it is a bunch of countries. Not China as people think? So obviously it is China. They are the main beneficiaries, you know, in the sense that they have what they call, you know, the China... Like if you look at the kind of the operating companies, we have three main... Company. Main operating companies. And out of the three, China and Malaysia are either the first or the second shareholders. You know, I don't have the percentages in mind, but for the most part you could call them the main beneficiaries. And of course the oil, you know, what oil for the most part sells to Middle East. And some few countries in Asia, few in Eastern Europe. And nothing here in the US? No, I don't have any data of anything that has ever come to America. No, none. That I could say was confident. Okay, okay. Now, so let's... Let us pursue this. Of these three, there is downstream, mid-stream and upstream. You were in mid-stream. How close are you to oil money? Ah, it's... I would say, you know, what I was dealing with, especially at the internal auditor. You don't see the money? You don't touch it? No. No, I never came into the point of knowing, you know, as I said before, I really didn't... I have never found anyone that was present at the point of production and knows exactly the daily volume and can say what we have produced today this much. All right? I did not find that person. I did not find anyone that was at the point of sales, all right, where the final products was going onto some of these ships. And you were the auditor. That is correct. All right, so, you know, sometimes the issue is working with the government because you realize there are a lot of great tips. And so, if you try to get into it too much, you might find yourself in trouble. In trouble. So that's that. One other thing, you know, I have been in Cuba a couple of times. And people that work for the Nile Pet, the petroleum company, are well regarded and they are considered as probably doing well economically or doing well financially. So when you let that company and return to its cool, somebody has to wonder if you have given up a very lucrative job for education. You know, obviously, what happened, there is a lot of myth about Nile Pet, obviously, you know, and there is some truth to that. The company was founded around 2005, all right. And the goal was to have a national company that, with time, can, you know, can become an operating company. But then the issue, all alone, has been, you know, that of, it became, in a sense, political, all right, because, you know, for you to kind of have, you know, to have something, a company that kind of grows from nothing to a national company that becomes an operator and can explore and can be given concessions by the government, you need a steady leadership, right? And the CEOs, you know, it was some part of, you know, how do you call it, a slinging door, a door that opens and closes. A revolving door. And so with the CEOs kind of in and out, you could see, you know, from the management point of view that this, in a sense, create instability, all right, because if you know, if you don't have any contracts that will say, all right, we have given you this chance. Five years, for example. You will be here for four, five years, ten years, you know, and the next thing you know is you kind of walk your ways around, you know, to become the CEO and the same way you walk around or becoming the CEO, you could actually get out the same way, you know, and so it kind of, you know, those who were, you know, lucky enough to be the managing directors came in through politics, they got out through politics. So they are political appointees. That is correct. It is like, you get in today and you are worth, you get another group that is trying to get you out tomorrow. Wow. And so in a sense, you know, you find managers who were very uncertain and instead of doing their work, they were worried about, you know, the politics of it, you know, trying to make sure, you know, there are loopholes and if someone is talking bad about me, you know, I should go out there and find a way of making sure that they talk about me, you know. And so how do you make sure that someone doesn't talk about you? You know, obviously you cannot kill people and so you find a way of using the source to kind of bribe people so that they keep quiet. So it was a trickier, you know, it had been a better trickier, you know, kind of situation, you know. And, you know, obviously, you know, at this point we have, we have Victor Ocho. You know, he was kind of removed, came back and I believe he is one qualified guy who has been doing a very good job and I feel like if he can be given a contract, you know, that can make him work for three to seven years, I think he can do better. But he is, you know, he obviously is a worried man because the politics, you know, won't let him do exactly what he needs to do, especially on a daily basis. And so that, I see the impediment now coming back to your main question, which was, you know, that people who have worked for Nile Pet are generally worried about it. You know, in the past before the war of 2013, at Nile Pet, people were paid decently, especially in dollars from 2005 to somewhere around 2014. Okay. All right. So a manager, you know, a director like I was, you know, you were getting a decent pay, you know, while the public, you know, what is it, the, you know, the government employees were getting paid in South Sudanese pounds. And you were paid in dollars. You were paid in dollars. But then if you look at our pay compared to, you know, the foreigners, they were getting paid at least 10 times than us. And so that, that, that was kind of, you know, bad because you are doing equal work, you know, pretty much the same, you know, same expertise. And you could be much qualified, you know, than a foreigner who is working with you. But then you realize they get paid 10 times. And so that was demoralizing. But then 2013 war came in. All right. I got into it in, got into Nile paid in 2016. And when I got in, you know, we, we were getting paid in pounds. And so I kind of, I kind of went in when the wells were dry. At that time, the, the currency is cracked. So we have less than 10 minutes left. So let's, let's, let's, let's, let's specify this. Let's get into the economics. You have been there in Sosudan in the oil sector. And, and, and, and, and you have come back here to the University of Vermont to pursue a TAD in economics. There are, the data is there. All the countries that have oil have not, mostly have not been successful in using that resource to develop their economies and their countries. That data is there. Unless you are a Saudi Arabia that has a lot of money, then you can use that money to, to buy social contract, to buy support from people. But if you don't have that much and you don't use that oil to develop your economy or your other sectors, you end up in a situation like Sosudan or other places. Data has it that only Botswana and Norway are the only two countries to date that have used their oil revenue to develop their other sectors, mostly by creating sovereign wealth fund that they then use to fund into other sectors based on your expertise. What do you think moving, looking, moving forward? What are some of your ideas that, that, that you think the policy makers should consider in using the oil revenues to develop the country, you know. You don't have to go into detail, but what are, what do you think? What could be done? Because the money will be there and the oil money will continue to be there, but how would it be used? Right, thank you, Akal. This is not an easy question. I don't think I have all the answers for it. I will try, you know, to give you what I know and what I have seen. And my experience, especially with the, you know, with the oil that Sosudan has, obviously it is, it is a wealth that very few countries have, all right. And it starts from the idea of being able to manage your own wealth. I don't think we can competently say at this point, you know, that we are the ones managing that oil, that we are the ones managing that source. It is being managed for us. By others. By others. And what get to us to some degree is something that we can have control over. But because we got out of Sudan and became a better nation state, like soon after that, our hands are tied. At this point, we cannot make a decision of kind of stopping that pipeline so that we can come up with another one that will infuriate Sudan, all right. And they could do anything. They, they, we could, really, I don't think we have a chance of understanding what they are, you know, what they will try to do. We tried that in 2012 when we closed it down, all right. We closed the pipeline down and we were thinking that we will be okay for the next 12 months. It became terrible within three months. And, you know, our situation has changed as a country, you know, in the past, you know, with the rebellion and all that, we were able to kind of sustain this because the good days were ahead. And when you become a country, it is better to tell anyone to say, you know, go to office, go and do your job, you know, the next thing they will, you know, they need to go back to my family in the evening, what would I give them? And so in a sense, you got to create incentives. And so that is one, you know, we, we, I don't think we have control over it, you know, because the people who are managing it, God knows who they are. I don't think I do. The second part of it, where I think we can benefit from this, is matching the skills, especially people with the right skills, or to be given assignment of what to do. We have a lot of people who are competent. Some think they are in the right places. All right? We have some very sophisticated engineers, you know, the water engineers, the mechanical engineers, geoscientists and all these. They should be the ones, you know, at all these points, you know, on the pipeline, kind of monitoring, you know, and making sure, you know, that they are measuring and that they have, they have the responsibility, you know, on behalf of the country, to make sure that oil benefits, you know, the country and the citizens. I don't think we have that. You know, we are not doing that. We have the skill for it. You know, we usually, you know, we have a lot of expatriate people who have come to the U.S. and have gone to different countries and are back home. But then, instead of that skill being tapped into, all right, they are being allowed to sit idle. All right? That's the second part of it. And the third part is the political instability account. As much as you and I know, we became, you know, a disaster as soon as we, you know, we became a country. And until we can fix the politics, it would be better for us to say, all right, we have a country that we call our own right now. Let's manage the affairs. And until we can take the conflict out of that, I just don't see how we benefit from it. I think we have started to own wrong footing. Thank you. I think we are low on time. We are probably less than two minutes. But I think that we will continue with this conversation another time, because there is more to it as I'm thinking there is. Even the way the oil is drilled, it will leave a lot of pollutions. Villages that were once, villages, lands that were once farmlands are no longer usable. And to what degree would the cleanup happen in order for those places to be reverted into what they were used for? Those are questions that we have. And again, as you explore your PhD dissertation, it would be interesting to see what you get into. So say your last words before we wrap up the show to continue another time. Again, thank you, Carl. And to my fellow Vermanters, thank you for taking care of us. We came to this state as refugees. And in the process, I feel like we have found our footing. And this goes to the kind of foundation we were given. And so I really appreciate everyone. We are very thankful to the state of Amman, to the resident. And to the city of Ballington, South Ballington and Wineske. I don't think we have ever gotten out of these samples. She didn't count it, no. She didn't count it, exactly. Yeah. So I am very excited to be back. Well, thank you so much, Megan. And thank you so much, Channel Town TV for hosting us tonight. Jankwajmabil is here in Brumman for a while. And so we will have another opportunity to interview him on some of the issues that we have not covered tonight. So we will end the show right there. And thank you so much. We'll continue with conversation another time. Exactly. Thank you. Thank you, Carl. Bye.