…on sugar
GuySuCo announced that by this yearend, they would’ve racked up an almost $1B deficit – $920million to be exact. Yup!! After Granger’s unilateral shuttering of 4 estates and throwing 7000 workers into the streets supposedly to stop the “bleeding”, we’re back to square one!! Now you’d think the PNC would do some introspection about the sugar operations since it’s clear that the supposed “dead wood” wasn’t the problem?
But then, dear reader, you’d be assuming the PNC’s interested in the survival of the sugar industry, wouldn’t you? And as we learnt in that schoolyard taunt, when you “assume” you make an “ass” out of “u” and “me”!! As we’ve pointed out ever since this newspaper exposed the PNC’s nefarious plan to shut down Wales Estate just before Christmas 2016, the PNC’s end game is to destroy the backbone of their bête noire, the PPP. And sugar workers have been that backbone ever since Cheddi Jagan wept at the graveside of the five sugar workers who’d been gunned down at Enmore.
He’d vowed to form a political party that would represent their rights and the rights of all working peoples and he kept his promise. They, in turn, remained implacably at his side like a rock. And the PNC wants to ensure that whenever the next elections are held, there’d be no rock for the PPP to turn to. Just look at how the PNC followed up with their mass firings. While training sessions for jobs in the new oil economy were held in all parts of the country – the sugar belt was avoided as if they had the plague!
When closures had been mooted before, there’d been talk of leasing the abandoned sugarcane fields to the fired workers and transition them into cash crops for the Caricom markets. But instead of following up on that, the PNC secured a $2.6 billion grant/loan from the CDB and used it to rehabilitate, drain, and irrigate lands behind Ithaca, Buxton, BV and Mocha – all PNC villages – then organised the people into co-ops and made marketing connections to Caricom for their produce!!
After the Bauxite industry had been downsized in the late 1980’s and the alumina plant shuttered, the free electricity programme had been continued through a subsidy to GPL, initiated by the PNC Government of Desmond Hoyte. This was supported by an equivalent sum from the PNC-imposed levy on sugar. But now that the PNC shut down sugar, they never even suggested the POSSIBILITY of subsidising the electricity bill of the fired sugar workers!!
At every elections since 1992, the percentage of votes from Berbice has declined via migration: the PNC wants to give that process a push.
Just enough to keep that 5000 vote gap!!
…on voting
Everyone thought after Justice George’s decision on H2H, Chairman Singh would’ve had her Commission make a decision on the way forward on elections in accordance with our constitutional commands. There are so many reasons for calling it quits of the H2H project and going directly into Claims and Objections. Why does she need a WRITTEN copy of Justice George’s decision?
All she had to do is ask her CEO Lowenfield for an update on his H2H timeline he’d issued when he got the directive from her predecessor and she’ll see that there’s no way elections can occur in time to fulfil the Constitution’s directive of elections within 3 months after a NCM’s passage. Then there’s the CCJ’s advice:
“The Court must assume that these bodies and personages (including GECOM and its Chair) will exercise their responsibilities with integrity and in keeping with the unambiguous provisions of the Constitution bearing in mind that the No-Confidence Motion was validly passed as long ago as December 21, 2018”.
…on friends
The digital age is changing human relationships. For instance, it has spawned a new species of friends. We now have “internet and online friends” who we may never see IRL. What’s that you ask??
“In real life”!!
