The unfair and improper transfer of taxpayers’ $$$

Sep 16, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Ever since I left Guyana in my tender teenage years, this nation has remained a moving and dominant part of my soul.
My father who recently passed away was a true Guyanese patriot who has instilled a powerful sense of love and patriotism for the country of my birth.
But something else has been instilled in my soul. It is the ability to see the forest for the trees and the trees for the forest when necessary.
I like to look for truth and I am always desperate to discover it. So here I am again on this issue of the US$38 million Venezuela rice deal. Kaieteur News’ article titled. “Millers selling to themselves, colluding with overseas buyers”, brought it back to the fore.
In my missives on this issue I categorically expressed that the windfall of at least US$10 million that was realised went, like everything in this corrupt and broken nation – to a few while the majority suffered.
Kaieteur News’s article hammers this nail home with striking force. Practices of price tampering were seemingly deliberate attempts to degrade the market and to drive prices down are being investigated.
Lower prices are then used by the real power players (the millers) to maximise their profits. But this is nothing new if some are to be believed. The Government has encouraged this voracious environment where greed is abundant and power overflows.
Contrary to what Minister Persaud stresses it is clear that Government must ensure more than “decency” to ensure price manipulation by millers does not happen and does not deny rice farmers the right price. Price manipulation is a criminal offence in the developed world and fixers go to jail if caught and convicted. It is not a case of ‘decency’ but a case of destroying livelihoods.
The Minister should know by now that the amended legislation over recent years has not protected farmers. Not when Mahaicony Rice Mills (MRL), one of the largest purchasers locally of paddy that controls an estimated 40 per cent of the local market owes farmers in excess of $250M in outstanding payments.
Not when the Minister has found it inconvenient to reveal whether the rice board has fined MRL for these failures to pay in a timely manner.
The Minister has to tell this nation whether MRL which controls 40% of the market, was one of the companies that benefited from the recent US$38 million Venezuela rice deal? To tell the nation whether MRL supplied paddy or rice in keeping with its market share of 40%? If MRL delivered 40% of the rice under the Venezuela deal it made close to US$4 million.
The Government needs to confirm to the public when exactly this audit of MRL was launched and whether MRL got any of the windfall from taxpayers’ hard earned sweat after this audit was launched.
The people of this nation need to know if the revenues collected from all of them paying for fuel went to MRL and other millers.
Who got the bonus from the rice deal? Does the Minister’s announcement that the Venezuela rice market is now open to all farmers mean that the recent deals giving fat bonuses went to mostly millers and select farmers?
I have criticised the policymaking ways of this government for a plethora of sickening ailments. But in every condemnation shouted from the pages of freedom they still manage to stay alive.
Despite the valiant attempts to slay press freedom in this nation an insurmountable truth prevails about the actions and policymaking of this government. It is broken in deeply virulent ways.
But beyond its broken state, one small group of the rich and powerful always wins and the rest of the nation rolls in the gutters of poverty.
The blatant enrichment of the already rich at the expense of impoverishment of the poor is an unrelenting theme in this nation.
At every turn, the party of Dr. Cheddi Jagan, the giant of trade unionism and the legend of working class struggle, continues to reward a few with the spoils collected from all. In this nation where men are hounded to death by leaping into a river to escape the long arm of the GRA and other men get massive tax concessions to import everything under the sun into this Land of Many Waters, we can only have so many tributaries of tears before a titanic flood washes this land away.
The American Revolution was ignited by the totalitarianism of taxation that bled America dry for the benefit of a few.
In a nation where despair is alive in everyday life and the struggle to pay for a chance of life is deepened by the outstretched palms of the taxman, poor people did not give their souls and the constant battering of their spirits to Government to enrich cabals and cliques while hunger roams the streets with crime in tow.
Michael Maxwell

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