Dear Editor,
Corporate governance was designed to facilitate guardianship of the company’s assets for their real owners. In the case of GuySuCo, the real owners are the citizens of Guyana, but it is clear that the Granger administration has thrown under the bus the whole concept of effective and efficient corporate governance.
Why does an entire Government have to be pandering to the opacities of a small cabal led by Clive Thomas over the welfare of thousands of ordinary people who still depend on the sugar industry for their daily bread?
By continuing to perpetuate the running of the largest state-owned enterprise with an acting CEO and no Board, adverse consequences have visited the corporation. By denying the sugar company a Board, this Government has done the following:
1. Injected a reduction of clarity in the decision-making processes. Such a situation has imported ambiguity into all levels of management, slowed down decision-making, and is causing unnecessary conflict across the organization.
2. Expanded the destruction of adequate process management at all levels across the corporation. Thus today, in GuySuCo, there is massive indecision across the corporation, and this has led to an attitude of lack of urgency when it comes to handling key and critical challenges in the industry.
3. Allowed the alignment of the strategy to disintegrate. Such a situation sends damaging signals to all stakeholders, which leads to demotivation, destruction, and dilapidation. But, most importantly, it will destabilize the privatization process for Enmore Estate to DDL. I am now expecting DDL to take the Government to the cleaners on this privatization process, which any wise investor should, and would, do.
4. Destroyed team dynamics, which has trickle down all across the industry, leading to there being not enough creative solutions being unleashed to solve the challenging issues across the sugar belt.
It is unfortunate that the largest public-sector corporation and the largest employer in Guyana has been allowed by the policymakers in the Granger administration to become this dysfunctional in such a short time. All the policymakers have done is contributed to the stagnation in the arrival of modernization in the sugar belt. Thus the risk profile across the sugar belt has not been reduced with the closure of estates and the severance of some 7,000 persons; it has actually increased.
My conclusion is this:- the problem was not the size of GuySuCo, but the quality of the decision-making process at the highest level.
GuySuCo has now become a cesspit for destroying talent. No professional in his right mind would want to be part of such a debased decision-making system. For GuySuCo to ever recover, it must build up its reputation to attract the kind of professionals who can provide value, strategic input, and build up the company. With the right leadership, GuySuCo can become an environment that creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
I, like many other Guyanese, struggle to be reconciled to the fact that such a powerful institution has been reduced to such a state of powerlessness that it cannot even benefit today from solid strategic counsel, because different factions in the Coalition cannot agree on a Board. Wither the sugar industry, because the Granger administration is still yet to learn Corporate Governance 2.0. This is not about them; this is about the 10,000 workers still in the system.
Regards,
Sasenarine Singh
