Dear Editor,
Mr Hamilton Green, in a letter captioned “Where is GuySuCo’s money being gobbled up”, seemed deliberately oblivious to justification given by Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha for the supplementary sums critically needed for not only GuySuCo to become viable once again, but the resuscitation of the entire Agriculture Sector, which became the target of destruction by the Coalition.
He claimed thus: “Mr. Editor, no one really knows how and where these billions of dollars are being gobbled up by GuySuCo management and the Ministry of Agriculture. Speak with people in the industry and no one can give lucid answers.”
Definitely, he spoke to the wrong persons, since his Coalition comrades were provided with these definitive and precise answers in Parliament on numerous occasions, but they vehemently denied their involvement to annihilate the Sector. This reminded of a song by Buck Owens, “No Fool Like an Old Fool”.
On August 23rd, 2019, I wrote a letter, captioned “The deliberate destruction of GuySuCo”, and therein I made it clear that from 2011 to 2015, the PPP/C Government invested 26 billion in GuySuCo, and no Estates were closed and workers’ livelihood was secured. In contrast, the Coalition spent $32 billion in ‘subvention’ and $17.6 billion from a ‘blood-sucking Bond – a total of $49.6 billion – and unconscionably closed four grinding Estates, pauperizing thousands of sugar workers. This meant that these billions were spent basically on the three remaining Estates.
Perhaps it would have been pertinent then for Mr Green to question the gobbling and guzzling up of those billions with absolutely nothing to show for it. I wrote numerous letters on this issue and provided real statistics therein. In fact, the then Finance Minister claimed that some of the billions will be used to make the four closed Estate fully operational to attract investors, and some were to be used for co-generating plants on the grinding Estates, mechanization of the sugar industry, and setting up of a plant to produce plantation white sugar to capture the CARICOM market.
The financial ‘genius’ Mr. Jordan had said, “We cannot keep them closed and mothballed, because when buyers come, they would probably not be as impressed as if they were working”. This was to further squander the money, which they did. ‘Yard sales’ were done daily with the assets on the closed estates, as friends and cronies ‘bought’ these for peanuts.
Today, the four closed estates stand as stark testimony to the diabolical acts of the Coalition to just destroy the perceived PPP support base and to steal. If the closed estates had remained operational, it would have been quite easy task to get them going again. This is where the need to make right the devastating wrongs done to not only the sugar industry, but to the entire Agriculture Sector.
It must be recalled that the budgetary allocations continued to get less and progressively less under the Coalition. In 2019 it was a mere $19 billion. It decreases by over a billion dollars annually.
The Coalition and Mr. Green should have visited these closed Estates to fully ‘appreciate’ their handiwork in wreaking panoramic destruction across the cane fields, the infrastructures, the factories, buildings, machinery and equipment, and everything in sight. They should visit now and witness the transformation done at the Rose Hall Estate. These were never kept in operational mode for the investors, but were cannibalised, stolen, and allowed to rot and decay. Therefore, the billions which are expended to reopen these estates are a result of the direct and deliberate destructive action of the Coalition Government.
They were not ‘mothballed’, but ‘cannonballed’, Mr Green. They should never again object to any allocation to the Agriculture Sector.
In conclusion, Mr Green, the Elder, was part and parcel of the gobbling up of the entire country and pauperizing of an entire nation by the PNC. The PNC bankrupted an entire nation and reduced it to mendicancy, and again, thanks to the PPP/C, this country has now become the fastest-growing nation in the world. Green, as an Elder, should do the honorable thing and apologize to this nation.
I am extremely proud of the statement made by the Minister of Agriculture, when he said that his Government will continue to invest monies in GuySuCo to correct the great wrong done to this entity and make it viable once again.
Yours sincerely,
Haseef Yusuf
