Mr. Lincoln Lewis’ misleading representations

Oct 14, 2018 Letters

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This is the final part of a letter by former Prime Minister Samuel Hinds.
Dear Editor,
Mr. Lewis charges us with breaking up the Guyana Bauxite Workers Pension Plan, “the single largest pool of money owned by African workers”. There had been extensive discussions about what was to be done in preparation for and on privatization. First, the Government had to find the monies to bring up to date a workers’ savings scheme, outstanding PAYE and NIS submissions and an estimated fund to pay enhanced retrenchment benefits, promptly. Preference was to close the old companies completely, provide all benefits promptly to workers and start afresh with the new private companies. For a number of reasons, we took the decision to bring the pension scheme to an end and return their entitlements directly to each worker:

a) as Guyana had experienced an inflation of 500 to 1000 over the time from its inception, the monthly pension payments would have been very small – even less than 20% of the (also small) NIS pension;
b) charges for a commercial manager of this closed, non-receiving pension scheme may have quickly eaten up the principal.

Mr. Lewis has been upset that the PPP/C administration did not hand over “this single largest pool of money owned by African workers, “I would guess that there would have been up to about 10% other peoples] to some self-proclaimed “African Leaders group”. We felt that our legal and moral responsibility was to provide whatever money was to their credit to the individual workers. We provided information on available commercial schemes to the workers and the schemes and invited Mr. Lewis to sell his “fund” ideas directly to the workers. This was not a cynical move – for success and satisfaction of whatever was their alternative “fund” plan, a direct, earnest, deep, trusting relationship needed to be developed between the expected fund managers and the fund investors – the workers.

Mr. Lewis again seeks to justify the continuing about 90% subsidized electricity prices across Linden as being “deferred wages/salaries” in a 1976 labour agreement; an arrangement whose roots go back to the 1940s and through the beginning of the ending of the isolation of that 100% company town, towards the end of the 1960s with the opening of the Soesdyke-Linden Highway. Up to about that time upwards of 80% of homes would have had one or more persons working directly with the bauxite company. Today, forty plus years later, not more than 20% of homes would have one member working with the new bauxite company of today. It was with a sense of a long overdue need for reform (first signaled in 1976 by then President Burnham) that we, PPP/C, during the Government-Opposition talks following the reading of our 2012 budget, developed an understanding for a phased merger of the electricity supply in Linden/Region 10 into GPL. The reduction of subsidies over the transition period would have provided additional financing for the development of the people and the Region. We all know how that turned out – a reform still to be faced up to someday.

Mr. Lewis raises again the event of the dismissal of some workers at Aroaima in 2009. I don’t know what assurances the then Opposition and now Coalition Government would have given then to Mr. Lewis and the Union, explicitly and/or implicitly. My position was clear – whilst I understood the two different positions and recognized that the union expected Government support, I could not find that the behaviour of the fired workers was acceptable; therefore, I could not call on the Company to reverse its decision. I certainly wanted and remained alert to opportunities for reconciliation. As I have remarked before, it has been unfortunate that in the circumstances of the racial and social separation in the bauxite company towns, the black-white struggles internationally of the times, and in the run up to Independence and nationalization, behaviour of workers was tolerated and even instigated, which otherwise would have been unacceptable. The disappointments with each other, which one could anticipate soon became evident in the gap which early appeared between bauxite workers and the Party and Government which they supported, made evident in the RILA protests which preceded nationalization. This disappointment and ensuing rancour could be readily sensed in then Prime Minister Burnham’s speech in Linden on the 5th anniversary of nationalization (in 1976), a speech in which he spoke about being the Prime Minister for all of Guyana and not just for Linden, and of the decision to merge the electricity system of Linden into the national GEC. We can see as recently as in 2012 the misguiding of then PNC MP, Ms. Vanessa Kissoon, and then PNC Regional Chairman, Sharma Solomon, in the lauding and encouragement showered on them as they organized and led those unfortunate protests, which ended so tragically; but subsequently, not long after, they were quietly dropped from the political front line.

Editor, as I close allow me to address one more emotional charge of Mr. Lewis. He charges that, “One of the first acts of the PPP/C on its accession to office in October 1992, was the targeting of sugar and bauxite. Sugar was removed from privatization attention, which allowed it to remain as a state-owned company, as mechanism was put in place to privatize bauxite. Hinds invited the Guyana Mines Workers Union (GMWU) and the Guyana Bauxite Supervisors Union (GBSU) to break the news of his government plan”. How distorted, how misleading, how insidious, how harmful a narrative on the privatization of bauxite! We, PPP/C, did not set out to privatize bauxite. The declaration of Minproc and the covenant entered into by the PNC administration before it left office shoved closure forthwith of Linmine in our face: we veered away from closure and eventually privatized to what we considered competent and capable partners who brought greater value to what we had.

Editor, let me not leave our then publicly expressed position on sugar hanging. Sometime after entering Office, we began working on, developing and in time published our Privatization Policy Paper. Along with statements on procedures, we declared that we would not be privatizing five named companies, one of which was GuySuCo. Why should we be privatizing GuySuCo, which was clearly returning to profits and had good future prospects, admittedly riding on the back of preferential sugar prices? There were also a number of serious questions for us Guyanese to chew on and arrive at some consensus. Who should be considered to have ownership of the benefit of the preferential sugar price – our country Guyana as a whole? Or the enterprises (owners)? Or the sugar workers? What parcels of land if any should be sold freehold, be provided on lease, of what length and with what restrictions. Could the privatized land be converted to real-estate development?

Ownership and availability of land always matter a lot. In proceeding with our regularizing of the extensive squatting in the Sophia area, and our extensive house-lot housing programme, our Cabinet recognized that our hands would have been tied if privatization of GuySuCo and its sugar lands had been completed. We spoke about the adverse situation in many Latin American countries where essentially all the land was in the hands of a few historically powerful families. On acceding to Office, with little or no money in our national coffers we depended on the ready availability of GuySuCo land at no charge, to provide the almost free house-lot land grants to warm the hearts of our peoples, about 100,000 families embracing about half of our population, all across our coastland, motivating them to make the sacrifices to build the best houses they could arrange for themselves.

Thinking of our (PPP and PPP/C) actions during this period from about 1990, there could well arise a “Lewis” from amongst sugar workers who would, like Lincoln, but from the other side, represent and argue that we PPP and PPP/C removed GuySuCo from privatization so that we could plunder it in the name of “the national good”… If that were to happen, I would be ready to argue and ground with him too..

Yours respectfully

Samuel A.A. Hinds
Former Prime Minister and Former President.

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