Dear Editor,
Many may have observed that over the last few weeks I was placed in a position where I had to call out the coalition government, which I supported in 2015, for its less than acceptable performance over the last year. This is a deliberate strategy to avoid the crass executive behaviour that was practised under past president, Donald Ramotar. Never again should it be allowed to happen and the youths have to put steel in their backs and ensure that “the good life” filters down to those at the bottom (the market vendors, the single mothers, the youths in general and so on). Because of executive actions of people like Donald Ramotar and his right hand man, Raj Singh, now with 20/20 vision, I would do exactly what I did in 2015 and give my support to the coalition government because it was the right thing to do.
The Sugar Industry Labour Welfare Fund (SILWF) was established by law, according to Professor Clem Seecharan in his book Sweetening Bitter Sugar to allocate funds for the upliftment and social welfare of those in the sugar belt. This was an outcome of the Venn Commission, which highlighted the awful conditions in which sugar workers had lived for decades. Let me be absolutely clear, that money does not come from government coffers; it does not come from other taxpayers; it is part of the entitlement to the sugar workers for their labour and contribution in producing sugar. The more they produce, the more funds are allocated from sugar sales to SILWF.
The funds are used to provide water resources to villages on the sugar estates, loans to sugar workers for housing, scholarships to children of the sugar workers and so on. What happened to SILWF under the leadership of Raj Singh at GuySuCo? Here, we were paying one man millions of dollars a year, but the board could not find the money to pay the dues for the workers between 2010 and May 2015. Luckily for the sugar workers, Mr Ramotar lost power and Dr Raj Singh was dismissed.
At the end of 2013, the net deficit in the SILWF was $43 million and I was told at the end of 2015 it was approximately $140 million. This situation has occurred because an executive decision was made not to provide the calculated dues owed to SILWF. This was the nature of the decision-making that occurred under the leadership of Mr Ramotar who claims he is a “sugar man”.
What is the reality today? The new coalition government came to power and they found this horrible situation left behind by Team Ramotar but have not to date remedied it. Again they found income to only pay their senior executive and not one cent for the workers’ welfare fund. Again we have another “sugar man” in the Cabinet of Guyana from Central Corentyne, but yet this situation has not been remedied.
This means that SILWF is now running out of funds and at the point where it may have to make the decision to start letting people go, because this $140 million deficit has made the agency technically insolvent. I was told that SILWF is now actively turning away sugar workers who qualify for a housing loan from their own funds. I have also been told that SILWF has suspended all of its infrastructure contracts in the sugar belt such as roads and so on. This only means one thing – social retrogression for the people on the sugar belt.
No politician can rest satisfied until this issue is sorted out, because like other workers, the sugar workers have paid their dues to this country for centuries. When uninformed people try to condemn how much is being transferred to the sugar industry today, they must take cognizance of the fact that it was sugar that contributed the most resources to this nation over the last 200 years and we must not be oblivious to the contribution from our brothers and sisters in the sugar belt.
The right thing to do is to immediately start returning tranches of the workers’ funds to them by making those deposits in SILWF. By the way, where is GAWU on this matter?
Yours faithfully,
Sase Singh
