The PPP’s political heavyweights have trained their guns unerringly on the management of GUYSUCO for committing the cardinal sin of threatening what is now, singularly, the most powerful mass-based organization in Guyana – GAWU.
The sugar union is extracting a big time payback from the government for its unswerving support for the ruling party during its years in the wilderness. Indeed, not even the clear and distinct messages emanating from the management of GUYSUCO (which itself comprises some of the Party’s blue-eyed boys) that the run down company cannot give what GAWU is asking, has made an impression on the PPP.
Interestingly, the Party’s General Secretary, Donald Ramotar, who has made more public pronouncements in the past few weeks than perhaps, in the previous six months, has said that the threat to de-recognize GAWU came from GUYSUCO’s management rather than the Board of the Company. Fiddlesticks, Mr. Ramotar. Do you really expect us to believe that a group of bureaucrats can fly in the face of the PPP without some kind of prior political go ahead to do so? And if that were so wouldn’t N.K Gopaul have known it and shouldn’t he have said it.
President Jagdeo appears to have had the last word in the matter, agreeing to shell out more than $750m to pay what many would regard as a political debt. Not that the sugar workers do not deserve to be treated right but does it really make sense to mortgage a bedraggled sugar industry to the wishes, nay political demands of GAWU? The PPP has given us the answer in no uncertain terms.