Are these men hiding?

Jul 03, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – There have been formidable accusations swirling around Drs. Clive Thomas and Rupert Roopnaraine in the media for different reasons. In relation to Thomas, Vishnu Bisram described how he and Ravi Dev intervened to save the sugar industry by securing foreign investments at a time when Thomas was head of the industry. Bisram concluded that Thomas was not interested in the industry’s survival.
Each time Bisram writes on sugar under the aegis of Thomas, Tacuma Ogunseye replies. What is strange about these frequent responses from Ogunseye is that he has no knowledge of the industry, never worked in the industry and has no historical and intellectual connection to the sugar world in Guyana. For all his decades in politics, Ogunseye never wrote one sentence on sugar. All of a sudden, he is an expert writing in the newspapers about the industry under Clive Thomas’ chairmanship.
How then could Ogunseye know all about those things he is describing in defence of Thomas? The answer is simple. I believe Thomas is providing him with a defence rather than directly addressing the accusations. It is my deeply held belief that Ogunseye is ignorant about the sugar industry, knows nothing about it and is therefore being advised to write.
If this is factual then it certainly is a sad indictment of Clive Thomas. Surely, Thomas has so many learned and decent Guyanese that can explain his role as GuySuCo chairman after 2015. Why of all people, Ogunseye?
It is clear to me that Thomas does not want to touch on his role in sugar after 2015. His party lost power since August 2020 and since then he has written a weekly column in the Stabroek News, without missing even one, and none of those compositions are on sugar.
Why is Ogunseye now the sugar expert and Thomas the silent one? Thomas is afraid of the impending polemical explosions if he defends the closure of the estates. The point is not the closure. Sugar was in trouble since the WTO replaced GATT. The sugar industry could not have survived if not subsidised. Subsidisation simply meant that Guyana was giving money to those who buy our sugar because we were producing below cost of production.
What Thomas as GuySuCo head did not do is to display truthfulness to revolutionary academia that he embraced from the late 1960s to 2015 when he came to possess state power. If you are downsizing the sugar industry by letting 5,000 workers go, two directions are the moral directions you have to face.
One is to find employment with the strong possibility of giving the unemployed the lands to enable them to survive. Secondly, pay them what they are legally entitled to. The APNU+AFC did none of this and in keeping with its racial and anti-democratic outlook, the retrenched sought the court’s intervention for their financial entitlements and won.
Five-thousand sugar workers meant by extension 28,000 mouths to feed. How can Thomas enter any polemic on his role as GuySuCo boss when he uttered not one word in support of those 28,000 workers? The man that wrote a book on socialism when I was a UG freshman in 1974 became the sugar boss in Guyana in 2015 and 20,000 persons faced starvation. Thomas will forever remain silent.
Next is Roopnaraine. Ravi Dev and Leyland DeCambra are not unknown political activists. Though DeCambra is not known to Guyanese he was one of the founders of the UK branch of the WPA. Both Dev and DeCambra within the space of two weeks have accused Roopnaraine of deceiving the Guyanese people on the holding of a commission of enquiry into the assassination of Walter Rodney.
Both men have written in the Guyanese newspapers that Mrs. Rodney requested such a commission and left it to Roopnaraine to shape the logistics. Both men said that after Mrs. Rodney returned to Guyana, Roopnaraine informed the then PPP government that Mrs. Rodney was no longer interested. Dev and DeCambra have made the accusation. Where is the reaction of Roopnaraine?
Surely, Roopnaraine must know that what is facing him are redoubtable curiosities about his role in the WPA, his relationship with Walter Rodney and his relationship with the PNC, Robert Corbin and David Granger. Roopnaraine lives happily in Tranquility Hall in Mahaica in a sprawling estate.
In 2019, he was visited by Caribbean icon, Eric Huntley, where the discussion centered on the Caribbean. Why can’t Roopnaraine explain his role in the controversy? One reason is that if he does, he is afraid Mrs. Rodney opens her mouth. He may not survive the embarrassment.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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