The bittersweet story of the establishment of Sueria Manufacturing

May 25, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Glenn Lall, the publisher of this newspaper, was never a cry-a-baby. When his newspaper which has the largest circulation in the country was being denied government advertisements, he did not run all around the Caribbean demanding that regional media houses pressure the Guyana government to reverse the policy of restricting State-ads to his newspaper.
When supporters of the ruling party and advertisers were encouraged not to buy or do business with this newspaper, Glenn Lall did not hold his head and bawl. He simply laid the facts out to the readers about the persecution that this newspaper was facing.
Against the advice of the management and editors of this newspaper he did took a decision. He asked his readers to pay $20 more per edition. Many of us within Kaieteur News felt this was a crazy decision; that it would seriously endanger the circulation of Kaieteur News.
But Glenn went ahead and raised the price because he wanted to ensure that his paper remained fiercely independent. So long as the newspaper could wean itself off of any dependence on government ads as well as those businesses that wanted to pick up the then government’s ‘fire rage’ against Kaieteur News, Glenn believed that his newspaper would survive and remain a voice for the voiceless in this country.
Many of us felt that the strategy to increase the price of the newspaper by $20 would lead to a massive loss of sales. But we were wrong. Glenn showed us all that not only did he understand business better than all of us but also that he understood the loyalty of his readership. Instead of the circulation going down as a result of the increase in price, it actually went up. Some of Kaieteur News’s competitors have since also increased their price.
The plans to cripple this newspaper being engineered under the previous administration had backfired. But those plans were not the only forms of persecution that Glenn Lall faced. This is a man who loves this country as much as he loves life. He had long decided that as part of his love for this country and its people he would pioneer the establishment of a confectionery factory. He saw that Guyana had a lot of raw materials, including sugar, which is produced in abundance, but which had seen a slash in prices that threatened to ruin the industry.
Glenn believed that with this resource of sugar, Guyana should be leading the Caribbean and making inroads internationally with its confectioneries. He saw how much foreign sweets were on the market. He felt that local manufacturing could challenge those foreign imports of sweets. And he decided that he would pioneer a confectionery factory.
But because he was reporting on the skullduggery that was taking place within the government at the time, he faced vicious persecution. The plant and machinery came in, but the persons to assemble them and provide technical assistance were denied visas. The excuse was that the engineers did not have sufficient ties in India to return after they would have completed establishing the factory. What utter rubbish!
India has the largest middle class in the world. That middle class is thriving. Why then would an engineer in India not want to return home after establishing a factory in Guyana?  And since when is Guyana asking persons seeking visas to this country to establish sufficient ties to their homeland as the basis of being granted visas?
We are a small, relatively poor country? We do not have a million persons. Go into a crowd of twenty thousand persons and you can spot a foreigner with ease?   So even if someone does not have ties, they can easily be found in Guyana and asked to leave. Is this not what we are doing at present with foreigners who overstay their time in Guyana? What about the numerous foreign nationals pouring into our country? Did they establish that had sufficient ties back home when they were granted visas to come here?
This excuse about ties was a lame one. It was tested when an engineer with an American visa was denied permission to establish the factory in Guyana. Here was someone to whom the Americans had granted a visa. He obviously had established to them that he had sufficient ties to return home to India if he visited the land of the free and the land of opportunity. But the authorities here refused him a visa. The objectives of the authorities in Guyana in denying the visa to the engineer with an American visa were clear.
Today, Glenn Lall’s dream of a confectionery factory is a reality. The factory is up and running. It is up and running because Glenn is no cry-a- baby. And also because a decent man named Donald Ramotar is now the President of Guyana.

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