Many terminated sugar workers from Wales Sugar Estate have not yet received their severance payment, in accordance with the law, even one year later. More than 4000 newly terminated sugar workers have been told by the Agriculture Minister that they will be paid their severance, as the law mandated, by the end of January 2018. But he cannot say where the sum of money required to pay the stipulated severance to the terminated sugar workers has been budgeted for in Budget 2018. He knows that it is not in the budget of the Agriculture Ministry, which had a $1.3 billion cut. In fact, those of us experienced in analysing national budgets cannot find anywhere in the Budget where the money has been allocated. Hopefully, the Minister was not deliberately lying.
Thousands more sugar workers are expected to receive termination notices in the next few weeks. The Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) and the A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) will deny this, but as day follows night, we will see them cruelly terminating more sugar workers in the next few weeks.
For a large mass of Guyanese, 2017 has been a miserable year. The misery was reflected in the quietness of the Christmas season. It was not a peaceful quietness. In fact, the quietness and the toned-down festivity during this Christmas season is a quietness pregnant with despair, when even those better off appear uncertain of the future. For most Guyanese, 2017 is ending with a future that by all accounts appear bleak. Only those that make up the APNU/AFC Government seem comforted by the under-development that was apparent in 2017.
More than 4000 sugar workers and their families have reasons more than most to worry. For them, 2017 is ending with despairing news of lost employment. APNU/AFC has admitted that they have no plans for these people and for the communities being affected by closure of sugar estates. The despair is heightened by the familiarity with what happened to the 2000 sugar workers and their families from Wales and to the community of Wales. Sugar workers and their families from Wales were in the same place at the end of 2016 as sugar workers and their families in Skeldon, Rose Hall and Enmore are right now at the end of 2017. Wales has become a poster child for impoverishment and this is what communities in Rose Hall, Skeldon and Enmore are now facing at the end of 2017.
The news was all bad for sugar in 2017; not only for workers throughout the industry, but for Guyana as a whole. Poor management by a hand-picked APNU/AFC management team led by Errol Hanoman, deliberate efforts to sabotage the industry and a fierce determination by APNU/AFC to end sugar, have brought sugar to a stage of total collapse. Even the low target of 174,000 tons proved too insurmountable a target. Worse even, the 154,000 tons the Finance Minister just a few weeks ago estimated as the final production proved too herculean a task. GuySuCo is still trying desperately to end 2017 not falling below 140,000 tons, the lowest production for more than 100 years.
For sugar workers, the bad news is not only the termination letters. Sugar workers have been denied wage increases for 2015, 2016, 2017 and, for those lucky ones who will still have a job in the industry in 2018, there is no signal that finally they will end the drought and earn a wage increase in 2018. Sugar workers API and other incentives have been essentially ended. GuySuCo and APNU/AFC have established a shameful 115,000 tons as their target for 2018. But their posture is one that makes the 115,000-target unachievable. There will be only three functioning sugar factories – Albion, Blairmont and Uitvlugt, in 2018 and these sugar factories only managed about 85,000 tons in 2017. It means that workers will feel the brunt of austerity measures once again in 2018.
Not everyone is unhappy. APNU/AFC is happy that they are on target in implementing their long-held plan to close the industry. The CEO is leaving and might already have left Guyana a richer man. Having earned a super-salary and allowances, he was hand-picked to carry out the hatchet-job of closing sugar. He is smiling for the holidays having brought the industry to a stage where international players will buy over GuySuCo’s properties for a song and dance.
In the meantime, as Government Ministers and high officials frolic during the end of the year festivities, the terminated sugar workers will contemplate the bleakness of 2018.
