Full disclosure & the sugar saga

Sep 03, 2017 AFC Column, Features / Columnists

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By Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo
Reacting to a hurricane of negative statements being made by the Opposition, a Coalition

supporter advised me: “Don’t worry wid dem, PM. They speaking wid forked tongue!”
When a person is accused of speaking with a forked tongue, that person is said to be hypocritical, duplicitous and misleading. Statements made by that person would generally be riddled with half-truths, direct falsehoods and deliberate distortions of fact. It becomes really hard to believe anything said by a person who is known to “speak with a forked tongue”.

FULL DISCLOSURE
For instance, the leader of the opposition declared that Guyana will be “worse off” when production of oil and gas begins. He has so many ulterior motives at this point that this statement becomes a prime example of speaking with a “forked tongue”.
The reality is that Guyana’s prospects for becoming a wealthy nation are high. It is everyone’s dream, everyone’s hope. The opposition leader, in his typical gloom-and-doom fashion, has been trying to paint a nightmarish picture showing Guyanese walking around with begging bowls, or starving, even as oil flows. We prefer to believe that our people are smarter than he gives you credit for.
Our Government is doggedly committed to transparency and has spent almost the entire two years of its life tapping into every possible technical source to derive a model framework to ensure that everyone benefits from our petroleum resources. Soon after the first big “find” was announced, my colleague Raphael Trotman, and I were doing the initial rounds in Mexico seeking assistance to craft the legal framework and to train Guyanese in Petroleum Engineering.
A lot has been done since then to strengthen our legal framework to deal with possible corruption and to build partnerships towards environmentally safe exploration and production. Our Government has partnered with an international multi-stakeholder movement that plays a watch-dog role to ensure there is accountability and transparency in all of our extractive industries.
We have explained the need to build institutions and systems that would steer Guyana away from the pitfalls that have turned the oil sector in some countries into some form of the “resource curse.” We have good reason to believe that life in Guyana will improve once we start to pump oil and channel gas into homes and factories.
But we have to make room for the ‘spirit crushers’ in our midst who would rather hand over a channel in the Atlantic that leads straight to OUR hydrocarbon deposits to our greedy neighbour. The opposition leader also claims that the 2% royalty from Exxon is a rip-off. But, Mr. Forked Tongue still has not told his listeners that his PPP government had negotiated a one half of one per cent (0.05%) royalty during his presidency!
Now he screams that Government must publish the ExxonMobil contract, the same one that he had negotiated in 1999. Did he publish it then? Perhaps there were legal impediments and clauses. Could one impediment have been the amendments to the Petroleum Act which were introduced in 1997 by the Janet Jagan government that placed restrictions on disclosure of information? Surely, he should tell the whole story, and truthfully.

THE SUGAR SAGA
True to character, the PPP has stirred up a hurricane of protests in the sugar belt. They are wagging the same old forked tongue and telling their supporters that: (a) the Coalition government is about to shut down the entire sugar industry, and (b) they could return the industry to profitability as is.
The PPP continues to refuse to acknowledge recommendations to contain the freefall of the industry, but despite their recalcitrance, we will say it once again: The sugar industry is not being closed down. It does require a very involved process to be saved e.g. mergers of operations, divestment and diversification, and for workers’ jobs to be protected.
This industry is in deep crisis. Those who are today speaking with forked tongues themselves presided over the bankruptcy of this industry. They left it with a debt tag of $85B. The industry is on a life-line that is feeding on subsidies and bailouts to the tune of $32 billion in the last 2-plus years.
The many years of willful neglect, political interference, corruption, misappropriation of taxpayers’ money and borrowed funds, square pegs in round managerial holes, and jobs for ‘the boys’, have placed GuySuCo in such a state of failure that full recovery requires a miracle. Sugar workers can thank Jagdeo and Ramotar for that!
Mr. Jagdeo had pumped $47B into the Skeldon factory, Guyana’s notorious white elephant. On June 9 last, a post mortem revealed that this factory was very defective at the time the contractors handed it over without any international certification. One critical part of the factory, the co-generation plant, had serious safety and design flaws. The study stated that it would cost US$17M (G$3.4 billion) to fix the numerous defects.
That forked tongue of Jagdeo’s has not admitted that sugar factory closures and mergers of estates began long before 2015. Also, lands that should have been given to sugar workers, or ceded to the proposed “other crops” division as specified in the turn-around plans of the 1990s, were gifted to his friends and cronies, and workers were left exposed and vulnerable. Yet we still hear the forked tongue telling the same sugar workers that the PPP could save sugar!

TERM LIMIT IS CONSTITUTIONAL
Then there is this issue of a third Presidential term that Jagdeo still hangs on to. President Cheddi Jagan had championed limitation to two terms up to his passing in 1997. He died before Mr. Ralph Ramkarran and I had finished crafting the document. Then in 1999, the year Jagdeo was made President, the party’s General Secretary submitted another proposal for constitutional review that limited presidential service to two consecutive terms.
It was written into the reformed Constitution, but that did not stop Jagdeo from vilifying Ramkarran for allegedly “butchering his chance for a third term”. An attempt was made at the PPP’s 2008 Congress to promote a third term for him, but it was a damp squib. So, while he “salivates” for another whack at the presidency, according to one commentator, he must remember that the Constitution of Guyana specifies a two-term limit. In truth, his prediction of Guyana becoming worse off with oil could come true if, God forbid, he ever gets that third term.

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