Dear Editor,
President Irfaan Ali announced from Belize that he engaged the leader of Guatemala on rehabilitating the sugar industry. He said Guatemala will be sending a team of sugar experts to Guyana. The problem with agriculture in Guyana has not been lack of expertise, but management and political interference at state run agencies. Politicians have not done the right thing. We don’t know the Guatemalan cost for rendering expertise in sugar, but it is expected it will be in the millions of American dollars. There is no need to bring experts from Guatemala to tell us what to do when we have better local expertise. That is wasting money. Is money also wasted on paying a Guyanese American, who recently became a diplomat, a consultancy of some G$896,000 monthly from February/March 2021? Is GuySuCo getting value for money spent? Will GuySuCo continue to pay the near $900,000 consultancy if the diplomat is getting another government salary?
Money is wasted while the right skilled people are not utilized. Guyana has the expertise to turn around sugar production and make the industry profitable. Local experts and specialists are not engaged, but are instead isolated and denied employment on account of disagreements with politicians. The worst misfits are hired in the industry. The millions in American dollars would be better used to hire local experts (such as J.B Raghurai, former Board Director, Nanda Gopaul, former Director, Abdul Yussuf, Electrical Engineer, Vishnu Panday, an expert in so many areas of production and management, Khemraj Tulsi who’s a specialist in Procurement and Agriculture Science as well as environmental science, among others.
Guyana has formidable specialists in turning around GuySuCo. The industry has alienated the specialists, replacing them with personnel who are running the industry into the ground. With the right team, GuySuCo will become profitable. GuySuCo is failing because of blunders in agriculture and GuySuCo. There are calls for inquiries or investigations in various areas of the Agriculture Ministry. An investigation is also needed into GuySuCo, as well as the Ministry of Agriculture, to get to the truth of all the allegations and accusations. We need a proper audit and an investigation into the several billions of dollars spent by GuySuCo from December 2020 till now. Albion, and other estates, had the best drainage system in the country just a few years ago. Today, Albion is a lake; boats are plying water on land where cane once grew. Albion is being destroyed and the government is doing nothing to stop the degradation.
Uitvlugt will be converted into corn farming and electrical generation by year end. There was a report out yesterday saying the four sugar estates will not be re-opened. The Enmore sugar packaging plant has been closed and handed over to political friends. Enmore is symbolic for the PPP. It was the Enmore Martyrs that gave birth to the PPP, turning it into a household name, and a champion for the working class and the poor. Since it came into office in August 2020, the PPP has done nothing to turn around Enmore that was decimated by the Coalition. Dr. Cheddi and Mrs. Janet Jagan must be turning in their graves at what has been happening at Enmore. GAWU, which also owes its birth to Enmore and sugar workers, has not mounted an effective challenge to the government for marginalizing and neglecting sugar workers.
Some 7,000 sugar workers lost their jobs under the Coalition. Promises to reopen estates and rehire the workers have not been kept. Just a handful of workers have been rehired. No estate has been re-opened. Worse, estates are being re-constituted and workers displaced. If you don’t re-open the estate, you will not re-employ the 7,000 workers. The government is using deceit to fool the sugar workers. After selling off the Sugar Packaging Plant, the government announced it will reopen it in Albion. But Albion is producing half the sugar it once did. The government said that former sugar workers will be re-trained to work in oil and gas sector. Can the government really train 7,000 and how fast? It takes more than a year to retrain these workers who lack non-agro skills. How will they feed their families while being trained? Once they are trained, what guarantees exist that they will be given jobs? Government officials are liberal in speech, not form in execution. They can speak on every subject matter, but after 18 months, they can’t deliver to fired sugar workers. Sugar workers need to wake up and learn that they are being taken for a ride.
Sincerely,
Haimraj Seeram
