A facile assessment of the roles, skills and characters of board members of GuySuCo

Mar 28, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
I take the opportunity to respond to the letter by Mr. Nazim Khan (Kaieteur News, March 25), though not in its entirety; I believe the onus of a general response falls on the Company, and the individual responses left to the discretion of the persons specifically mentioned or alluded to in Mr. Khan’s correspondence. Since I happen to be one person mentioned by name, I hereby exercise my discretion to reply.
In his criticisms of the membership of the Board of Directors of GuySuCo, Mr. Khan writes: “In fact the Keith Burrowes and Donald Ramotar are recycles and I would not want to heap any praise on them because they have to share the blame for GuySuCo’s current state of affairs. Keith may be a nice person but he has taken on the character of the immediate past chairman of GuySuCo who knows not that he knows not and is vexation to the spirit of all things business.”
Mr. Khan goes on to state in his letter that, “Keith and the likes of Gita Singh Knights [sic] are merely pushers of figures because that is what they know best. They look at the company through the accounting spread sheets and simply say what is apparently wrong but cannot bring solutions to fix the problem.”
First of all I would like to acknowledge and compliment the undercurrent of deep concern for the industry that runs through Mr. Khan’s letter, and assure him that my experience has pointed me to the realisation that every single member of the Board of the entity contributes tangibly based on their respective skills set.
That said, on the general notion that placement on the membership of the board of directors is “survival by affiliation”, as implied by Mr. Khan, is a hasty generalization. I would like to take the opportunity to note that board membership of any public sector institution in Guyana comes without remuneration (I joined the Board in later 2008) in some instances, the costs are (immeasurable), the major reward being the opportunity to serve your country.
Specifically with regard to his references to me, while I am unclear of what Mr. Khan implies by saying that I am “recycled”, I suspect that it is in keeping with the major theme of his critique, that board membership of the entity somehow constitutes a perpetuation of the relevance of individual members past their time.
If this is indeed what Mr. Khan is suggesting, it might be useful for him to be informed that after being involved in the crafting of the current Blueprint strategy document, I had tendered my resignation from the Board.
I was asked to withdraw the said resignation and to be part of the current board which has the responsibility of implementing the strategy; I accepted.
Mr. Khan’s charge that I am simply a pusher of figures and somehow incapable of strategic conceptualization outside of a spreadsheet analysis, presents a one-dimensional picture of me and one that I believe is contradicted by my professional history.
That said, I freely accept the charge that my core professional experience has been in the management of numbers and this is a strength that I provide to the pool of skills that comprise GuySuCo’s Board of Directors.
Indeed, my major responsibility on the Board has been to find ways of enhancing the procurement process of an entity that makes billions of dollars of purchases annually.
In fact, the board (through which I sometimes took the lead) has begun implementing systems to enhance the procurement process while focusing on strengthening the Management Information Systems (MIS) of the entity. To date, we have been able to see preliminary results. Is Mr. Khan suggesting that someone bereft of the capacity to “push figures” or analyse spreadsheets be tasked with that responsibility? I freely confess to not being familiar with every single aspect of the sugar industry but the truth is I don’t need to be.
Mr. Khan sees the need for the assignment of collective “blame for GuySuCo’s current affairs”, but ignores the fact – in his criticism of my supposedly singular skill in accounting – that there is the need for complementary qualifications in the composition of policy formulation body of any entity as complex as the national sugar company.
I would like to also address the rhetorical flourish, “vexation to the spirit of all things business”, which Mr. Khan employs to seemingly suggest that I am somehow anti-business. It is difficult to respond to such a charge within the context of my position on the Board of GuySuCo.
I would humbly offer to suggest, however, that my chairing of the Georgetown City Council Implementation Committee – made up of a primarily private sector membership – might tend to imply a character that is not, in fact, a vexation to the spirit of all things business but one which embraces the meaning contribution of the private sector.
This fact was also evident in the prior work done during the Commission of Inquiry (CoI) held to investigate the affairs of the Georgetown City Hall.
If these facts are not enough, I then appeal to Mr. Khan to await the private sector’s response to the Council recently approved 2010 Budget – due to be publicly released next week – as a way of assessing my ‘anti-business’ credentials, since I was instrumental, via the lending of my figure pushing and other skills, in crafting that budget.
In closing, let me state my belief that public stakeholder input via the media and other channels should be a crucial aspect of the formulation of the policy of any public entity, GuySuCo included. What Mr. Khan has done however is to dilute what may very well be plausible concerns both by his sweeping generalisations of the issues as well as a facile assessment of the roles, skills and characters of individual members of the Board. Notwithstanding, I thank him for his letter and while I was reluctant in the past to address personal attacks expressed via the mass media, I believe it is one avenue to educate the public of the real issues and clarify misconceptions as they unfold.
Keith Burrowes

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