More Skeldon shenanagans

Jul 21, 2024 Letters

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Dear Editor,

I refer to a letter written by one Bagwandin and published by the Kaieteur news of 11^th July 2024. Bagwindin’s letter, for whatever reason, is seriously flawed on many levels.

When I met Mr. Jagdeo with my father in 1999 at Hermansen house, and we told him that expanding Skeldon was probably not a good plan, he told us that Godfrey Da Silva, then head of Go Invest, I think, had informed him that it was a solid investment.

Editor, if Mr. Jagdeo had told Da Silva that he wanted to put the Skeldon factory on Mars, he probably would have produced a study to say it’s OK. They decided to expand Skeldon BEFORE the alleged feasibility was done by Booker Tate, I say alleged, because I never heard of any feasibility, and neither has anyone else at the then highest levels of management of that corporation who I consulted. It was a political/ego decision and not one based solely on economics. Since then, not much has changed with the PPP. Except they continue to introduce bad plans, executed VERY poorly into practice, examples, of bad plans are Amelia and the gas to shore project, poor practice operations GWI, GPL, GuySuCO, Police, are only a few examples.

I must stress again that the Booker Tate which Hoyte retained to manage GuySuCo in 1989, was not the same company which engineered the Skeldon Project, the Booker Tate Hoyte hired, was founded in 1988 from an amalgamation of two companies, Booker Agriculture International and Tate & Lyle Agribusiness, two companies which knew Guyana and indeed the Caribbean sugar cane conditions well, since they both had vast investments in the Caribbean sugar industry.

Unfortunately, this company was acquired in 2017 by Bosch Holdings. Under this new South African company with people, who did not understand the Guyana situation weather, soils etc., and retained by a government, which was asleep at the wheel as usual, destroyed the Skeldon cultivation even before the expansion actually started, since the water from the 10,000 acre planned expansion area of the Manarabursi swamp, was allowed to drain into the existing Skeldon cultivation without taking the necessary steps to expand the drainage system into the Courantyne river! As a result, Skeldon, which had the best producing cane fields in the industry, started producing sugar cane which had worse quality than Uitvlught Estate due to water logging, since the extra water from the expansion area, flooded the existing cultivation for two to three years.

You can’t put amateurs to manage national enterprises.

Editor, Jagdeo’s regime presided over the destruction of the Guyana 400-year-old the sugar industry, just as they are destroying the oil industry, which we never had any track-record of managing in our history, prompting one to ask again, why have we not hired competent companies from abroad to help us? Why is Dr. Adams not in place to serve the country? These people cannot even manage the electricity supply to this country; we the citizens are paying more and are receiving less reliable power than almost anywhere else in the world.

All of this is due to bad decision making, and the PPP refusing to take constructive criticism as an indication of concern by citizens and not a nuisance or affront must stop! Not once in all the years that these horrible decisions were made keeping us as, what the world bank labelled, a Heavily Indebted Poor Country [HIPC] the only other one in this hemisphere was Haiti, did the PPP ever take advice from its opposition or concerned citizens and the media, I sat in that Parliament from 2006 to 2010 and budget after budget was presented each one with hundreds if not thousands of pages, and I am not aware that even one number was changed through the intervention of the opposition, which numbered more that 48% of the seats in the Parliament. Surely something is wrong with that picture.

The Bosch Company which took over the management of GuySuCo from Booker Tate, were not qualified for that job, being totally unfamiliar with our unique and challenging bad weather and soil situations, and the government of the time and its incompetent GuySuCo managers, were unable to see it, or address it, until faced with complete disaster.

The new Skeldon factory however was a different problem, the board at that time wanted to buy the new Skeldon factory from Walchandnagar Industries Ltd. an Indian company which had by that time already built 40 plus 300 ton per hour sugar mills worldwide, they were also an original equipment manufacturing company, it was them which  the board of the corporation  wanted to supply and build the factory, but it was Mr. Jagdeo who overruled them and decided to go with the Chinese contractor who had no proper background in such constructions, and it was clear from the start, according to my sources, that parts of the factory were obtained from different manufacturers, since pipe sizes etc. had to be modified to allow the various components to fit together resulting in the disaster which followed. Editor it was a total no brainer. One can only draw the most adverse inferences as to why the Chinese were given preference.

I appreciate that Mr. Jagdeo is under much stress at the moment due to pressure from the local Media especially the KN, and apparently all of the PPP are rushing in to misdirect the public to protect him from responsibility, since at this time, this one man, who is now posing as an oil Czar, is mainly responsible for the demise of the Guyana sugar industry, and seriously calls into question his  competence to manage anything, especially an oil industry and especially since these incompetent corrupt people refuse to retain competent external management agents to help the people of Guyana to manage their Oil sector.

At one time I heard Mr. Jagdeo say that he is not too concerned with the future of the Bauxite industry, as long as no one expects him to dip into the consolidated fund to help it, I heard that statement personally, and am prepared to swear to it in court, but since the sugar industry is their political support base, they persevere in showing that they want to keep it alive, but the workers are not benefitting from the massive monetary interventions, they are. The serious allegations that the opposition [Mostly Afro-Guyanese] want to close the sugar industry which they consider to be too much of a massive drain on our national resources is grossly misplaced.

Mr. Editor, it is also my honest opinion that much of the money thrown at GuySuCo does not reach the workers’ pocket. The more money they plough into that entity the richer the contractors and the politicians get, and not the workers or the people of Guyana.

Tony Vieira.

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• Bagwandin, Da Silva, investment, shenanagans, Skeldon

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