PPP co-founder calls for competent Guysuco Board

OP pays consultant US$14,000 per month


…pays US$1000 for rental of Eccles property for Minister Following the expose on the controversial purchase of 20 laptop computers eyebrows are being raised over certain payments authorised by the Permanent Secretary in the Office of the President, Dr. Nanda Gopaul. At least two of the payments, which this newspaper has been privy to, deal [...]


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Guyana govt withdraws disapproval of LEAD project - Demerara Waves www.caribnewsdesk.com/news/7973-guyana-g...oval-of-lead-project

Founder member of the Peoples Progressive Party (PPP), Ashton Chase has called on government to appoint a competent board to help oversee the loss-making Guyana Sugar Corporation (Guysuco).

“If the present ownership remains, the first step in this direction is the appointment by the authorities of a dedicated, experienced and productive management board,” he said. Addressing the opening of the 57th Delegates Conference of the National Association of Agricultural, Commercial and Industrial Employees (NAACIE), Chase said that if the state-owned Guysuco changes ownership, those in control would be expected to ensure that the industry returns to its “prosperous days”.

The pro-PPP Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU) and the political opposition have been clamouring for similar features of a new Guysuco board as well as a strategic plan that would likely push up production and service the company’s huge debt.

Government plans to appoint a new Guysuco Board by July 1.

He reflected that sugar was once the leading contributor to Guyana’s economy but has since deteriorated to being none at all. “Instead it is heavily reliant on the state’s support or its very existence and full time operation,” said the 88-year old Chase. The National Assembly this year allocated GUY$6 billion to help bail the corporation out of its woes.

Guysuco's sugar production target for this year has been set at 216,000. That's after raking in only 187,000 tons in 2013- the lowest in 20 years- instead of the targeted 240,000 tons. The corporation owes its creditors, including suppliers and banks, more than GUY$10 billion. At the same time, its annual wage and salary bill is more than 60 percent of revenue

Chase, the only surviving PPP co-founder, noted that the huge investment to modernise the Skeldon Sugar Factory at a cost of more than US$200 million appeared to be a “further and serous loss to the industry and the country”. At the same time, he called for an end to the blame game about the state of Guysuco. ““This is not the occasion for casting blame and simply laying blame at the door of creators of the problem. It is the occasion to mount consultation and arrive at plans to help in the resurrection of the sugar industry,”  said Chase, a  former Minister of Labour, Trade and Industry.

The opposition Alliance For Change (AFC) and A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) have been consistently blaming the PPP-Civic for the collapse of the industry.

Chase further recommended that NAACIE and GAWU to engage the President about again making Guysuco profitable. “Although this will benefit the country, the trade unions in the industry have a primary and vital role to perform in its restoration,” he said. Among the priority issues that Chase recommended that the unions urgently address are mechanisation, elimination of water in cane fields and the scarcity of cutters.

Chase, Jocelyn Hubbard and Cheddi and Janet Jagan co-founded the PPP in 1950.
caribnewsdesk.com

The company of sly people who don’t care
May 13, 2014 | By KNews | Filed Under Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

A cricket journalist from India, Mr. Rahul Bhattacharya came to observe Guyana three years ago, and the result was a travel novel titled, “The Sly Company of People Who Care.” I can’t comment on the book since I have never read it but this cricket journalist will be reading extracts from his novel at Moray House today.
What an interesting spectacle it will be this afternoon; spectacle in the sense of how the cricket man will be courted by his sixty-five listeners. Moray House said it sent out sixty-five personal invitations and the public cannot be facilitated because there isn’t seating accommodation for more than sixty-five.
Mr. Bhattacharya will be in the company of sly people who don’t care, people who don’t care what Guyana has become in civilizing terms and the outrageous country India has always been in terms of skin colour, race, racism, poverty and colonial values.
I’m thinking of going to India, pose as a low caste nobody who sells bottled water, get into the Bollywood studios and see how skin colour works in a country riveted by the caste system (I will be accepted because they will think I am from Tamil Nadu).
I plan to title the book, “The not so sly company of people who care about whiteness.”  This afternoon at Moray House, the company of sly people who don’t care will pour praise on this cricket journalist for writing about Guyana and on the man himself.
This company of sly people who don’t care was very silent when the Government of India through its High Commissioner here in Guyana last year intervened with a local newspaper and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to protest a published review on a book on Mahatma Gandhi done by one of the most respected American journalists the past forty years.
Certain aspects of the book were iconoclastic and revisionist and tantalizes the reader into biting curiosity of a secret side to Gandhi. A chapter of the book encroached on Gandhi’s legendary “impeccability.”
One wonders if the cricket journalist read that book, “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi” by former New York Times editor, Joseph Lelyveld. One wonders if any of the sixty-five guests may want to ask Mr. Battacharya what he thought of the Government of India buying up a chest full of letters by Gandhi never seen before, just a day before they were to go on auction by Sotheby in London.
The letters will not be available to researchers. Now that is sly act indeed by the Government of India.
The sly company of people who don’t care will no doubt abstain from any questioning of another author who will recite extracts from her book at the same event with Mr. Battacharya. This is Ms. Gaiutra Bahadur and the book is, “Coolie Woman: Odyssey of Indenture.” I haven’t read this title either but became wilder than the wind with curiosity when I read in a letter to the Stabroek News by Dr. Lomarsh Roopnarine that Ms. Bahadur ventured into the area of political history in her book and had a mouthful to say about the seventies and eighties.
According to Roopnarine, in a chapter captioned, “the Magician’s Box”, Ms. Bahadur tells her readers that Guyana was run by a dictator, Forbes Burnham, who rigged elections for decades and banned wheat flour and foreign goods like a neo-colonialist. She went further to refer to the PNC Government as African-dominated that treated East Indians badly. Bahadur’s readers, Dr. Roopnarine goes on in his letter (of May 7 in SN), are informed that Cheddi Jagan was the independence hero of the East Indian Guyanese who was a father figure to Indians and a symbol of how they were wronged.
Strange enough, Bahadur, the journalist turned political historian, has not replied to Roopnarine. One would like to think that given the scholarly credibility of Roopnarine and the sweeping statements she made about the seventies and eighties in Guyana that Bahadur would reply to defend her excursion into contemporary political history.
I am on unsafe ground here. I haven’t read “Coolie Woman” therefore I cannot ask Bahadur to comment of her take on Burnham and Jagan since I only have Roopnarine’s letter to go on (not sure when the edition of this paper is out and the sly company of people who don’t care will advise Bahadur not to reply). But surely Dr. Roopnarine, a university professor, cannot misquote Bahadur so badly.
If Roopnarine is right, then Bahadur will need a lecture on the relations between Jagan and the PNC Government of Forbes Burnham and the role of Walter Rodney in stealing Jagan’s thunder in the seventies and eighties.