Dear Editor,
Re the Skeldon factory issue, I met Mr. Jagdeo, along with my father, in 1999 at Herdmanston House and we told him that expanding Skeldon was probably not a good plan. He told us that Godffrey Da Silva, then head of GOINVEST, had informed him that it was a solid investment. They decided to expand Skeldon before the alleged feasibility was done by Booker Tate. I say alleged because I had never heard of any feasibility plan, and neither had anyone else at the then highest levels of management of that corporation with whom I consulted. It was a political/ego decision and not one based solely on economics.
I stress that the Booker Tate which Hoyte retained to manage GuySuCo in 1989 was not the same company which engineered the Skeldon Project. The Booker Tate Hoyte hired was founded in 1988 from an amalgamation of two companies, Booker Agriculture International and Tate & Lyle Agribusiness, two companies which knew Guyana and indeed the Caribbean sugar cane conditions well since they both had vast investments in the Caribbean sugar industry. Unfortunately, this company was acquired in 2017 by Bosch Holdings. Under this new South African company, with people who did not understand the Guyana situation – weather, soils etc., and retained by a government, which was asleep at the wheel as usual, the Skeldon cultivation was destroyed even before the expansion actually started, since the water from the 10,000 acre planned expansion area of the Manarabursi swamp was allowed to drain into the existing Skeldon cultivation without taking the necessary steps to expand the drainage system into the Corentyne river!
As a result, Skeldon, which had the best producing cane fields in the industry, started producing sugar cane which had a worse quality than Uitvlugt Estate due to water logging, since the extra water from the expansion area, flooded the existing cultivation for two to three years. The Bosch company was not qualified for that job, and the government of the time and its incompetent GuySuCo managers were unable to see it, or address it, until faced with complete disaster. The new Skeldon factory however was a different problem. The GuySuCo Board at that time wanted to buy the new Skeldon factory from Walchandnagar Industries Ltd., an Indian company which had built 40 plus 300 ton per hour sugar mills worldwide. They were also an original equipment manufacturing company. It was they who the Board wanted to supply and build the factory, but it was Mr. Jagdeo who overruled and decided to go with the Chinese contractor who had no proper background in such constructions.
According to my sources, parts of the factory were obtained from different manufacturers since pipe sizes etc. had to be modified to allow the various components to fit together resulting in the disaster which followed. Editor, it was a total no brainer. One can only draw the most adverse inferences as to why the Chinese were given preference. The allegation that the opposition want to close the sugar industry, which they consider to be too much of a massive drain on our national resources is grossly misplaced. Editor, it is also my honest opinion that much of the money thrown at GuySuCo does not reach the workers’ pocket. The more money they plough into that entity the richer the contractors and the politicians get and not the workers or the people of Guyana.
Sincerely,
Tony Vieira
