Concessions to Guyana Goldfields

May 31, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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One night during the 2015 election campaign, Michael Carrington and I had finished speaking and Khemraj Ramjattan was on the platform. The place was Tuschen. A gentleman came up to me, identified himself as an employee of Guyana Goldfields and unfolded a number of papers on industrial violations by Guyana Goldfields. I perused the documents and they looked authentic.
I suggested that he speak with one of the leaders of the Alliance For Change. I called Carrington over, made the introduction and left Carrington to it. I never asked Carrington what became of his investigations. Now that I have published Carrington’s involvement, he may wish to go public.
Of course since that night in Tuschen, Carrington became a parliamentarian. Last year, I received another complaint about Guyana Goldfields. I did not follow up because of the volumes of complaints I get. I keep saying over and over; this country cries out for a human rights group with resources to help victims.
Guyana Goldfields is in the news for the large state concessions it received. Generous state disposition to foreign companies by obscure, developing countries like Guyana is an internationally normal practice. Those of us from outside of the war room, maybe, cannot understand the dynamics of international relations of poor countries and the exigency to attract global companies on the part of governments.
We are not inside so maybe we lack knowledge of certain complexities. I doubt radical socialist leaders in power today would balk at generous treatment for foreign investors. Desperate to move Guyana out of the economic mess he inherited, President Hoyte granted GTT and OMAI prodigious concessions.
The EXXON agreement is no doubt seen in that context especially given our protracted security dilemma with Venezuela.
My attitude is not intolerance to state generosity for foreign investors but intolerance to exploitation of the local work force. This is where socialist activists miss a crucial point about capitalism in the West. Companies may earn super profits in the US and Europe but the mechanism to prevent industrial abuse are ubiquitous.
Radicals may denounce the democratic pretence of capitalist society but there are genuine mechanisms for stopping workers’ abuse that a country like Guyana woefully lacks.
One fundamental reason that explains why companies in Western capitalist countries could be brought before industrial tribunals has to do with the level of wealth in a country. Many public investigators in the developed West are not hand-to-mouth people. It is not easy to bribe them with a pittance. This is not to say there isn’t corruption among public officers in the US and Europe; there is.
But in a place like Guyana, it is a runaway train. The explanation is simple. It will take twenty years for a Labour Officer to pay off a bank loan for a car. He/she works for a salary that is fixed on the public service scale.
This columnist is told repeatedly by sad ex-employees of many rich private companies that the Labour Department is an ugly, grotesque failure. Do I believe them? Yes I do with every bone in my body. Why do I believe them? Because I know of countless complaints that have vanished into thin air. I guess you know why.
The present configuration of the Labour Department is a useless ornament left over from very old colonial days.
It is my opinion that President David Granger has a preference for judges to sit at the helm of many state institutions. One transformative idea the present government can leave for posterity is the complete overhauling of the Labour Department.
Make it a separate body detached from any ministry with judicial powers, say like that body that is still on the shelf – the Human Rights Commission or even the Ethnic Relations Commission (the ERC can summon you to appear and can indict you).
Staff it with three retired judges (who are willing to serve) with a good compensatory package. Have a quota of researchers that are university graduates. This will be a billion miles away from the present shape where the labour officer is a junior public servant earning $80,000 monthly and have to investigate a company that is not only a multi- billion dollar entity but also a powerful friend of those in government.
My experience with the Labour Department is that big businessmen sometimes bark on them. Remember a friend of then President Jagdeo ordered his workmen to detain a group of NIS inspectors.
Labour officers are not treated any better. I doubt whether now or in another fifty years, the Labour Department will ever be reformed. Perhaps, never! Not in Guyana!

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