On Arrival Day, 2018, some Indians have little to celebrate

May 05, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The generations that lived in Guyana from the late 19th century onwards until the early nineties have been positively touched, some directly, others indirectly through sugar money. In that period, sugar was Guyana and Guyana was sugar. Those who are aficionados of the reign of Forbes Burnham maybe do not know or know but don’t want to admit it that the nationalization drive in the seventies was in large parts financed by sugar money.
So many benefits from the seventies that still stand tall today were derived through the patronage of sugar money – the transfer of UG to Turkeyen, a first class education at UG, the Corentyne highway, the Canje Bridge, the Demerara Harbour Bridge, just to name a few. The Guyana National Service was partly financed by sugar money. This was the seventies when sugar prices soared to the skies and touched the sun and the stars.
The glory of sugar is gone. In philosophy, we call that dialectical movement. Society is dynamic. Institutions and values are born in one zeitgeist, and die with the advent of a new zeitgeist. Perhaps the most ironic example of the changing nature of the world was the legal castration of a hero who helped the West to win World War 2 in cracking the Enigma code.
He was a homosexual and it was illegal back then. After castration, Alan Turing committed suicide. Today, a man can legally marry a man in the very country that convicted Turing.
The demise of sugar is sad, tragic, traumatic and philosophical mournful. But dialectics have caught up with sugar. But there is nothing dialectical about the mistreatment of retrenched sugar workers in 2017. A changing world economy virtually killed off sugar production in Guyana.
Europe no longer needed our sugar; thus, it no longer paid a guaranteed price for it as it did for almost a century. In a globalized economy, Guyana’s sugar could not have competed on the world scene.
It was asking too much of a class divided society to sustain the sugar industry through a subsidy costing dozens of billions each year. Other classes would have demanded same treatment. The argument would have become brutally logical. If the government can pay sugar workers to keep their jobs, others sectors would have said why not pay us too. I doubt there is a government in the world that would do that. But the PPP did it. This is where things became complicated and politics became a zero sum game.
Once the sugar industry remained alive, the PPP was guaranteed permanent power. And the PPP government financed its biology. In the 2011 elections, the PPP still won the government. In the 2015 elections, the PPP lost parliament by one vote and lost the government by less than 5000 votes and has just one seat fewer than the ruling party. The sugar industry played a huge part in these electoral configurations. What the new government did was to collapse two decisions into one – the political and the financial.
Financially, the state could not upkeep sugar. Politically, it was to the ruling party’s advantage to stop keeping sugar alive because in so doing you were keeping the PPP alive. In miniaturizing the sugar industry, power is no longer guaranteed to the PPP and the state does not have to find billions from elsewhere to maintain those who will always vote for the PPP.
But in this complex interplay, human lives cannot be toyed with and in retrenching five thousand sugar workers in one swoop, the present government derailed its credibility among every citizen in this country. It is simply unacceptable to put five thousand workers out of employment in a small economy like ours, especially when you think of the connecting links that will collapse, the villages and the thousands of jobs that are intricately woven to the industry. One tiny example should suffice – the retail trade in the villages.
What was mind-boggling was that the government knew it was going to downsize the industry in huge ways and did not put an alternative in place. That was inhuman. Equally anti-human was the fact that the government did not legislate for severance pay even though it knew it was going to miniaturize the work force.
At the time of writing, there is still no land distribution. Ex-sugar workers must be given free land. I believe a national body should manage a fund to assist retrenched sugar workers and all of us, the entire Guyana should contribute. Let us raise a few billion dollars for these souls whose families are now facing a tsunamic future.

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