Dear Editor,
Years ago I was an MP and I was also a political/social/economic commentator. So as a busy body investigator and an MP, I saw that Bernard De Santos salary was more than the other PPP MP’s/Ministers and I made it my business to find out why. It turned out that in the past the Ministers of Legal Affairs/Attorney Generals [MOLA/AG] used to get the same salaries etc. as the rest of the Ministers but then came a time when President Hoyte [HDH] wanted a gentleman, whose name was Keith Massiah, to be his Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs. But when he approached Justice Massiah, and invited him to be AG, Massiah declined and stated as his reason that his salary as Chancellor, which he held from 1984, was much more than the MOLA/AG.
HDH wanted to make sweeping changes to the way Guyana conducted its affairs for his Economic Recovery Programme to undo much of the socialist concepts of the Burham era. So he needed Justice Massiah, a very highly respected Jurist in this country, badly, and so to attract Massiah HDH continued to give him his salary as Chancellor. And that is how up to today since 1988 this anomaly still exists. When I went to parliament in 2006 and met Bernard De Santos, I accused him [for fun] of not being candid with Dr Jagan about the higher salary he was receiving as a result of the HDH/Massiah matter. I liked Bernard, but his explanation was a little lame.
I raise this issue now, not only to recount some very important but amusing events, but recently, the salary of the CEO of GuySuCo was announced as 1.8 million/month. I don’t pretend to know how this salary escalated to that lofty level over time. What I do know, and this is why I am writing this now, is that they have been closing factories, reduced production from nearly 330,000 tonnes to less than 100,000 tonnes by reducing the corporation from having 11 factories to only 3 factories and the salary of the CEO has not change. And to make matters worse, they were appointing some very dubious people to head that corporation, to the detriment of the workers and the other tax payers in this country. Equally, they have not pruned the head office compliment of staff to reflect the diminished size of the company.
MP Ferguson has every right to ask these questions. And I urge her to expand her queries to include the questions as to how the amount of staff needed to operate an over 350,000 tonnes sugar production corporation can be the same as for one which only produces less than 100,000 tonnes.
Sincerely,
Tony Vieira
