A game of incompetence is being played out

Jul 01, 2017 Letters

Dear Editor,
My attention was drawn to letters from Mr. Tony Vieira that was published in your June 28 and 29th editions captioned “My pronouncements on the sugar industry are always right” and “GAWU and the PPP contributed to the crises in the sugar industry”, respectively. The two letters were conjoined and previously published in another section of the media.
In the letter published on June 28, Mr. Vieira, among other inputs, described the current CEO of GuySuCo as being “unfit to lead the diversification of GuySuCo” and stated that “indeed I believe that he is the wrong person to see it through this dangerous period for sugar”, and he listed 8 reasons to support his claim that the gentleman is the wrong person to lead the sugar company.
In the letter published on June 29, Mr. Vieira posited that Paul Bhim, the current Finance Director, “would make a better CEO for GuySuCo today”. He further stated that “long ago I wrote about him, that he was removed as CE by the PPP because he had the guts to say that there was “no cane in the fields”, which he inherited, in order words the man is not a hypocrite”.
Well, Mr. Vieira, not so fast. The “long ago” that you referred to was June 9, 2013. It was when your letter captioned “The sugar industry is in free fall” was published in another newspaper. In the said letter this was what you stated with reference to Paul Bhim “To confirm that an enquiry is essential and that the corporation is in confused and incapable hands we have to look more closely at an article of June 3rd; we are doing this not to see what Mr Chand is saying, but to see the responses of CEO Bhim to Mr Chand’s accusations.
Mr Bhim’s first response to Mr Chand’s challenge is unbelievable when he was reported as saying that currently the corporation was conducting cane estimates for all seven estates. The report went on to say, “He noted that going into the second crop of the year, GuySuCo had to ensure that enough cane was planted to produce the yield necessary to make the original second crop target of 170,000 tonnes.”
Editor this is the CEO of our biggest industry telling us in June 2013 that he has yet to see if enough cane was planted to produce the yield necessary to make the original second crop target of 170,000 tonnes! He should have known this before he made his corporation estimates at the beginning of this year when the Finance Minister gave the projections in Parliament, not now, a few weeks before the start of the second crop when he is saying that he still doesn’t know how much cane was planted in the 2012 second crop, and how much cane he will have available for reaping in 2013.
Any private company would have fired this man immediately. But the nonsense does not end there: he goes on to say, “We are not looking at importing sugar as yet because the second crop needs to be finished… but we have had to import sugar in the past.” This report as said above appeared on June 3rd. Do you mean to tell me, Editor, that the CEO of the corporation in June does not know how his 2nd crop will do? But he projects that it will start earlier than usual in the third week of June, in the rain, and that he has to wait for the crop to finish before he decides if it will be necessary to import sugar for the local market or not?
So, Mr. Vieira where did you state that Bhim “was removed as CE by the PPP because he had the guts to say that there was “no cane in the fields”? You did not. As a matter of fact it was you who felt that “any private company would have fired this man immediately”.
Let’s visit the letter of June 29th, where you described the current CEO, Errol Hanoman, as being “unfit’ to lead the sugar company. In your June 9, 2013 letter this was what you said of Hanoman “I am still asking myself why Mr Errol Hanoman, a very competent former Finance Director of the corporation resigned from this job as CEO after only about year in office.”
It’s obvious Mr. Vieira, there has been a complete inversion process in your appraisal of both gentlemen, and by the way your statement that Bhim “inherited no cane in the fields”; it was inherited from Hanoman. It’s a game of incompetence played out on musical chairs.
Selwyn Narinedatt

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A game of incompetence is being played out

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