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India’s help will not solve our sugar woes

Mar 09, 2023 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – The government’s planning is haphazard. This is one of the reasons why the President had to make a big fuss about the signing of an agreement with Mount Sinai Hospital for digitization of health records, and now the Vice President is hinting at the possibility that India is likely to assist since it has the expertise and has done this work and is likely to do this cheaper.

Did the government not know this when it rushed into a commercial arrangement with Mount Sinai? Did it not explore bilateral options before inking that deal or was it more concerned with the optics in the health sector?

This is PPPC’s governance. The failure to plan is to plan for failure.

Without any bilateral programme, India is already impacting on the country’s health sector.  But it is doing so in the private health system and not the public health system. Indian’s doctors and nurses are providing excellent services locally, with the nurses showing a vastly superior work ethic than has ever been seen in Guyana. Indian nurses are lifting the standards of healthcare services without any intervention on the part of the government. But why does Guyana have to go to India for management and building capacity in the health sector? Indian nationals have not been the only foreigners who have come to Guyana and made a vast difference in public healthcare. The Cubans are doing so also. They have a top-notch record when it comes to medical research and management of health facilities.

Cuba has been exceedingly kind to Guyana. Under Jagdeo’s Presidency, hundreds of Guyanese were able to qualify as doctors, compliments of free training provided by the Government of Cuba. So why should we not be returning the favor?

Why not bring the Cubans and give then total control over the 12 new hospitals which Jagdeo says are going to be built this year? Why not give them the opportunity to upgrade the technical capabilities of the public health systems? Is it not time that we repaid the Cubans for the all years of kindness and generosity which they have provided to our people, including training hundreds of doctors?

At his last Press Conference, Jagdeo also spoke about India assisting with increasing productivity in the sugar industry. But this has been tried before and has not worked. What possible assistance can India lend to Guyana which will help the beleaguered sugar industry, and industry which was ailing but which was placed in intensive care after that failed behemoth at Skeldon?

No attempt is being made to ask the Chinese government to fix that beleaguered factory. The APNU+AFC had asked the said Chinese government to fix problems with the Convention Center which Jagdeo had built with assistance from China. That country spent hundreds of millions fixing the Center. China does not want a white elephant to tarnish its reputation in Guyana. It will willingly examine what are the defects and take action. But there has to be some reason why the PPPC has been unwilling to engage China on this issue. Not so long ago, we heard that the Guatemalans were likely to assist in reviving the local sugar industry. That seems to have fallen off the radar, as this column had rightly predicted. The government is yet to lay a White Paper on its plans for the sugar industry. It wants the Guyanese people to have faith it its promises. But when it comes to sugar, the promises by the PPPC years ago to have a turnaround plan caused the industry to turn back rather than turnaround.

Now we are learning about more plans to benefit from technical assistance from India to improve sugar and the health sector. But what is Guyana giving in return? It is known that India is keen to take Guyana share of profit oil at market prices.  But India is also a giant in solar energy? So why does Jagdeo not put on hold the gas-to- energy plant and ask the Indians to come to see whether there is a cheaper alternative in the form of solar energy? That is not going to happen. But we are going to have technical cooperation in healthcare and sugar, two areas where Indian’s expertise cannot surpass that of Cuba.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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