Sugar workers’ bizarre choice

Dec 17, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Komal Chand, was elected President of GAWU, last September, making him one of the world’s longest serving trade unionists at the helm of any union. Mr. Chand has chalked up more than thirty-five years at the top of the GAWU pyramid. Do readers realize that almost half the population of this country wasn’t born when this man assumed the leadership of the sugar union?
The Komal Chand saga makes for interesting reading and it brings into focus how responsible are sugar workers that want the State to subsidize the sugar industry by a dozens of billions of dollars each year.
So our tax dollars go to subsidizing sugar workers who display no responsibility to the people of Guyana who fund them. Is this how they pay back the people of Guyana by voting to be their leader, a man who had 35 years in the industry most of which were spent in the Parliament of Guyana as a member of the PPP. First question – what has Mr. Chand achieved for sugar workers in the 23 years he sat as a Member of Parliament for the ruling PPP?
The Skeldon factory to date remains the largest state investment in the history of this country. Today Skeldon is a failure. But Mr. Chand never apologized for this gargantuan mistake of his government. On the contrary, he blames the APNU-AFC for failing sugar. Sugar failed under Mr. Chand’s party. And while sugar was falling down, Mr. Chand was representing the interests of the ruling party in Parliament.
This brings us to the second question. Why would a trade union want to belong to a political party? It is an old conflict of interest. Which comes first – your party or your union? Matters take on an unholy turn when that party gets into office. Which comes first – your union or your government?
Sugar workers may appear funny in the eyes of the analyst. While sugar was dying, sugar workers never rebelled against their union leadership, on the contrary, throughout the PPP’s 23 years, they voted for this man to be their union head.
It is my opinion that this is irresponsibility. How can you as the workers of an industry put their faith for 23 years in a leader who shares his duties inside the walls of a contradiction – he serves his government and party and trade unionist interests at the same time. Such a process is not scientifically possible or politically achievable. This irresponsibility has a dimension to it that is indicative of political sadism. Why would workers vote for such a leader?
So are sugar workers saying to the Guyanese nation that we must be sensitive about their plight and support a yearly subsidy to the industry to keep them afloat while at the same time they continue to place their trust in a leader that failed them? Against this background, my choice will be to remove the subsidy and let the industry be diversified. There is a plethora of frameworks available for the alternative to sugar, many of which can be found in the letter pages of this newspaper for the past year.
GAWU wants the sugar industry to be saved so the union can be saved in the process and Chand could deepen his permanent leadership. The PPP wants the sugar industry to be preserved so that the PPP could preserve its traditional constituency, a constituency that originally brought invincibility and omnipotence to Cheddi Jagan and his party more than sixty years ago. What is playing out here is incomprehensible politics that has no parallel in the world.
The PPP wants to keep the sugar industry alive against the brutal reality that the era of sugar is dead and gone. And it wants this type of arrangement so that a huge, hard core section of the PPP anatomy could remain in intact. But where in the world would you find a ruling party or a government practising such suicidal generosity? You just have to take a look at the herculean stables of miasma that Georgetown lived in to see that such suicidal generosity will never come into existence.
The PPP accepted that a thriving, elegant, clean, green Georgetown would benefit the PNC because there is where the PNC has its support while the PPP get no meaningful succor from Georgetown. So it starved Georgetown and kept it filthy. The PPP regime felt UG lecturers were anti-PPP so it ran UG into the ground.
If the government bankrolls the sugar industry, the PPP stays alive. Why would the PNC and the AFC want to give taxpayers money to the sugar industry so Mr. Chand can lead GAWU forever?

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