Dear Editor,
Why do we insist on perpetuating the most glaring form of discrimination against the local engineering expertise who are all familiar with GuySuCo’s factory technology right across the industry, by repeated invitations to foreign engineers.
Joe Alfred – A mechanical engineer who rose to be a Regional Director
George James – A chemist who became an Administrative (now General) Manager;
Narvon Persaud ‒ who like Lance Tyrell, an electrical engineer, not only managed factories, but did secondments as general managers at the former Guyana Electricity Corporation (now Guyana Power and Light).
Tyrell ‒ worked with Desmond Perreira on the installation of the Enmore plant. He was one of those Booker cadets who was thoroughly exposed to the manufacture of various factory components by the Booker companies in the UK, Fletcher and Stewart being outstanding among them.
Why then is the blatant mistake being repeated, given the non-productive experience of similar groups of visitors five/six years ago.
The exclusion of local competencies is clearly the result of deliberate decision-making, albeit at a prohibitive cost, with the potential of perpetuating the trend of non-achievement so far, of announced targets. The paralysis which has gripped the sugar industry is clearly the result of an incestuousness that has infected the body politic of the institution.
Surely these ad hoc intrusive interventions could not be substantive elements of any thoughtful strategic planning. What is pathetically clear is that, while these knee-jerk decisions have not so far benefited the industry, there is no coordinated training and development programme aimed at upgrading the capabilities of technical and non-technical managers alike.
Again, in one example, interventions were made by invited UK consultants, whose only experience of sugar was in their coffee. Yet they were paid irrelevant sums to guide a set of incapacitates, in human resource management techniques of a highly technological and industrialised environment, unrelated even to GuySuCo’s ‘mechanisation’ programme.
So it is plain that a defective mechanistic thinking engulfs most senior decision-makers in GuySuCo, who prefer to hide the truth from themselves, refuse to learn from their mistakes, and consequently commit to blaming it all on the weather – for public consumption of course.
We are now in the rainy season!
Yours faithfully,
E B John
