August 3 ,2022
Dear Editor,
In 2020 having been asked by Dr. Irfaan Ali if I would agree to be one of his national candidates in that year’s election, I said yes. At that time what the APNU people in charge did [2015-2020] to my family at Houston, was unacceptable and they lost my support.
Many of us keep asking ourselves when will Guyana finally get the Government it deserves. The short answer is never. Too many of us in this nation are still allowing too much corruption to pass unquestioned. Guyanese were fed up with corruption in 2011 and put their faith in the AFC, and the AFC took away the control of parliament from the PPP. In my view since 2011 Guyanese were looking for an alternative, and they were completely betrayed by the AFC which party in 2015 had joined the PNC to form the APNU and instead of stabilizing that coalition, they were even more voracious feeders on the Guyanese patrimony than the PNC members of the government. And the Guyanese people know who these misfits were.
There is still place for a third force in Guyana since the PPP only enjoys a one-seat majority in the Guyana Parliament, making what we are seeing incomprehensible, surely it should be clear that for many the Guyanese tolerance for corruption has reached the saturation point, so it cannot be corrupt business as usual. The PPP must understand this. Yes, GECOM confers on the winner of the elections the title of executive President but that’s all, it does not say that he can form the government. He would need the majority of the seats in Parliament to do that. As an example, let’s say that 4 parties are running in an election and two get 25%, one gets 24%, and the fourth party leader gets 26%, GECOM is obligated to name the person with 26% as Executive President but he can’t form a government, put this way, one can easily see the ridiculousness of the provision. Nothing in the constitution prevents him from forming a government with one of the other two parties which received 25%; what the constitution says, according to Sir Fenton Ramsahoye’s pleadings in the Jacob Rambarran case, is that in the negotiations between these two parties making the coalition the position of President is the only position in the coalition which is non-negotiable. That’s all the Guyana constitution says. In 2011 the PPP in violation of natural democracy formed a government without a mandate from the people and did not control the majority of parliament.
In the nearly two years I have been associated with this Government, I have seen things being done which frighten me, and I don’t scare easy. But not to report it would be unpatriotic.
I have seen the CEO of our biggest corporation telling untruths to his board, his President and the nation, for example there has been a lot of communication in the media about articulated tractors, as a member of the GuySuCo board I was unable to respond, and I don’t write under assumed names. I am therefore announcing that on 11th June 2022 I resigned from the Board of GuySuCo.
At first the CEO of GuySuCo wanted to buy 22 of those articulated tractors, the two members [only two] of the entire Board who worked in and understand the sugar industry were against the very concept of replacing the John Deere fixed frame tractor with one whose only purpose is to pull trailers. We therefore objected to it and the matter went to the President.
I refused to accept this result and the lies which were perpetrated in the report of the trial.
One of the two machines which were brought here for the trial broke down after working only a few days, and since the trial several months ago the machine has been inoperable, and they are now discovering that the machine is made up of a hodge-podge of parts from all over the world, making acquiring parts next to impossible. But with all of this information at hand, GuySuCo has recently decided to buy eight more!! There can only be one explanation for all of this!! And like an iceberg this tractor story is only the tip of the wicked agenda being executed in GuySuCo today.
GuySuCo has numerous problems which cannot be addressed by the incompetent set of people currently running it, just one example which even the management does not fully understand is that this local industry is changing from hand labour to mechanical harvesting operations, and they do not comprehend, even now, that you can’t tell your Board that in most years there are only 75 days when ploughing can be done by machines due to the wet nature of the soil, but you can continue the scheduling of harvesting your cane for 220 days per year by machines!! Louisiana USA has low lying lands and heavy rainfall close to Guyana’s and their cropping season is 100 days. Also the way the mechanization of Guyana is going, I very much doubt that what they are doing can work. Not wanting to be associated with any of this, I resigned!
We must look more closely at what Louisiana is doing and mechanize and lay out our lands for mechanization using their system, since what the incompetent locals in the industry are doing now, cannot possibly take us out of this morass of stupidity which is prevailing in the sugar Industry today. When Booker Tate was here they had advocated the Louisiana system for the Skeldon project, it was inevitable and highly recommended but it was so badly implemented due to inexperience and lack of understanding of what the Louisiana system should really be, that Skeldon ultimately failed.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
