One must have to be a dolt to believe that the treatment at present being meted out to the sugar workers is because the country cannot afford to keep them at work. One only needs to ask oneself if these workers would have been treated in this manner had the PPP/C been in government, to which the answer would be a resounding no. What we have here is not the absence of funds as much as it is the redirection of priorities. Simply put, equal citizens they may well formally be, but on the government’s agenda the sugar workers do not have the requisite level of priority to be kept in employ: end of story!
Similarly, one would also be extremely foolhardy to believe that now or in the near future, ordinary citizens are likely to witness any appreciable improvement in their standard of living as a result of the present brutalization of the sugar workers. It may be possible to deploy the subsidies going to the sugar industry more profitably, but speaking in a faraway land to an audience ignorant of the behaviour of his government towards a hefty proportion of the working class, it was no less a person than our president who called upon his audience to view development as a dialectical relationship between profits and human livelihood with a focus on the latter. At least since the 1970’s the signs were there that the sugar industry could not perennially depend upon protected markets and to survive it needed to be fundamentally reformed. It is not the fault of the workers that the political leaderships – both PNC and PPP – did not begin the reform process in a timely fashion, so why are their heads being so crudely placed on the block?
