Every schoolboy in rice producing communities knows that millers are an exploiting class.

Crop after crop, year after year, millers behave as if they are living hand to mouth. They don't allocate a workable percentage of their sales revenues to a special payables account that ensures prompt and adequate payments to farmers.

How many rice millers are paying their fair share of taxes? One of Fazal Ali's rice-miller friends at Windsor Forest declined my request for an interview in the early 1990s by explaining that he didn't want the income tax department to know his business.

One has only to look at the size of millers' homes, the kind of vehicles they drive, the frequent air miles their families chalk up, etc and then one would see how they lie brazenly to farmers about not having money to pay them on time.

Rice Farmers ultimately are responsible for this debacle they are in. For 20 years they continued to vote for the PPP while they were living in the shit pile.

Well they now have to suck it up and deal with it.

for decades they embraced the PPP infiltrated and owned RPA. Well now for the first time they have created their own movement to represent farmers independent from any government.

The rest of Guyana needs to follow suit.

banna, u are surely missing the forest for the trees

while u rant pointlessly about how rice farmers vote, the millers are taking bags upon bags of unearned taxpayer money to the bank and laughing their heads off

the PPP x-percenters smiling broadly

Does anyone here thinks that APNU cares about the sugar and rice sector?

I think they do care about those sectors. There are many folks in APNU including John Yates and others who understand those sectors in much more substantial ways than most in the PPP today.

The lack of understanding in the PPP and sheer unbridled ignorance is what led the PPP to destroy Gaibank and other important institutions that supported farmers in GY. Instead of tightening up the lending process and tweaking the rules of the bank to make it more accountable they threw out the baby with the bathwater.

I think many persons underestimate how much the PNC did for agriculture in GY, their biggest problem was execution and there were other over arching issues that caused their failure. Burnham isolated GY and also prevented some of the large multinational investors from coming to GY meanwhile in Venezuela and other countries in SA.

Burnham and the PNC depended too much on the state to own and be the economic engine.

They do to the extent that disaffected people in those industries will not vote PPP.   

Reality is no one knows what an APNU government will be like.  The PNC of today isn't the PNC of the Burnham era.  They will be more like the post 1990 Hoyte, but we didn't get a chance to see how that would have ended up.

I agree with this view.  The problem is when he went power mad after 1973 his dominance over the economy allowed him to victimize people.

But folks have to admit that in the 60s and early 70s the PNC placed MORE emphasis on the rural than they did in the urban areas.  MMA project, road construction, rural electrification/water supplies, high schools in rural areas, and the poorly executed "feed, house and clothe" campaign.  This initially was aimed at allowing local producers access to local markets, not necessarily available to them because of our colonial love for foreign items (apples, grapes, and foreign ice cream).

Had Burnham retired in 1973 he would have been well thought of.  Problem is that his power drunk incompetence undid most of the positive things that he did in the early part of his regime.

Much of the key infrastructure and other work Burnham completed is what the PPP thieves are feasting on today.

The PPP has gotten insanely wealthy from the companies and entities Burnham Created, GPC, GuySuCo are 2 to name a few. They have also raped NBS and what they have done is taken NICIL another PNC creation and bastardized it using the vehicle of NICIL to enrich themselves to insane degrees much of which the local population seems oblivious to..........

The PPP has much to thank Forbes for............as you notice Rohee is now defending all things forbes I think he is having trouble discerning Papa Forbes from Papa Cheddi.

Gentlemen,

What an intelligent exchange.

I look forward to the day when Guyanese vote on our great inheritance and heritage rather than a concocted arrangement of an Indo teamed up with an Afro or vice versa. That our leaders know we deserve progress and there is justice in their ways. From their justice, Guyana can be justified to it citizens.

This is why I laugh when the PPP pretends that they wouldn't have been the same economic disaster that Burnham was.  Thank God for Hoyte that they had to abandon their Castro loving tactics, or Guyana would have been in the same hot soup that Cuba is in today.  We all know full well that under those circumstances Janet would have been just as adept at establishing tools of oppression, bas Fidel Castro was, as she was a nasty and vindictive female creature.

Yes it is and its a pity that we don't behave more like this. We do know that people in Guyana read this forum, maybe to gauge how overseas based Guyanese are thinking.   Now imagine if we confined our comments to insightful commentary instead of the vulgar brawling which too often happens here.

The reality is that neither the PPP nor the PNC have been all bad.  Even though on balance their net contributions have been negative.

Sayyy what???

You need a lash....badap...right on your flat head...and another one just to make sure the first one hit the mark. Both of these governments were horrible. The first got caught is the miasma of liberation movements and communism. The latter simply were piss poor greedy bastards who sat in the cold of  the burnham regime just waiting to get in to double up on the thiefin'

Siggy, neither APNU nor the AFC can afford not to care about sugar and rice. Their political self-interest alone demands that they care.

This ****er J has to be high.

I stated that the net contribution was negative.  How ever to say that they did nothing positive is wrong.

You pointed out some positive things that happened during the BURNHAM era, which was clearly worse than the Hoyte era. You therefore make my point.  Even though the net contribution of the PNC under Burnham was negative, you concede that he did a few positive things.

Ditto can be said about the PPP, and this is coming from some one, who, unlike many PPP refugees, maybe even you, was hostile to the PPP from the very beginning.

In fact stormborn can pull out some of our arguments from around 2002 when he was still a PPP supporter.  Now why did he support the PPP if he claims that nothing that they did had any value!

Sometimes one has to be careful about throwing the baby out with the bath water.  The PNC fostered a poorly executed plan to encourage local production.  The PPP dumped it and now our manufacturing sector, outside of partial processing of commodities (rice milling, and sugar), is smaller than it was then.

The fact is that more poor people now own their own homes under PPP rule than before.  Massive corruption has occurred and with much abuse (the syndrome of poor execution equivalent to the PNCs "Food, House and Clothe" campaign). 

But as with the PNC FCH program, one cannot claim that there wasn't value, that if properly executed, wouldn't derive benefits.

Whether APNU, or (very unlikely) the AFC replaces the PPP, they must not do what the PPP did and that dump every thing and every one connected to the PNC.

there is a fundamental, consequential difference between Burnham/Hoyte/Jagan developmental programs and those of Jagdeo/Ramotar

the former were conceptualized to address the needs of the people first and foremost . . . mismanagement and corruption were byproducts of poor political praxis and absence of strong, democratic, institutional controls, among other things obvious

the latter were conceptualized to address the 'needs' of a small, rapacious, corrupt cabal . . . mismanagement and poor planning were built-in, and used as tools to rob the Guyanese people

why the f**k should taxpayers garland these jagdeoite bandits for providing them with the scandalous Berbice Bridge ripoff just because they can drive from Corentyne to Blairmont side without using a ferry [see Demerara Harbor Bridge for context], or the Marriott grand larceny because the PPP can point to an internationally branded hotel, or the Amaila Falls grotesquerie that still can rise from deserved ignominy to saddle future generations with backbreaking electricity costs taxpayers can not walk away from, or the criminal broadcast spectrum giveaway, or Alexei Ramotar's fiber optic cable tiefman special? . . . and i can go on and on and on and on

look dude, g'wan suh with your silly straw men and lame argumentaion

Oh yee who have limited memories.  Jagdeo was powered by greed and corruption, and Burnham by power drunk insanity.  Maybe you don't recall GUYLINES, every time there were rumors of items other than rum and cigarettes being available.

Do you think that Burnham nationalized 70% of the economy out of love for the "people".  No he knew that if he controlled how people earned a living he could intimidate them into submission. 

Some positive things occurred in BOTH regimes, even as the dominant results were deeply negative.

Do you think that "Feed, House and Clothes" or the distribution of house lots are bad things.  Or good things poorly executed?

The PPP abandoned the FCH campaign and now Guyana is awash with imports and our manufacturing sector much weakened.  Will the PPPs house lot distribution suffer a similar fate only because it was a PPP initiative?

Careful you repeat what the PPP did when they dismissed every thing and every one connected to the PNC.

BTW I worked at Coop Bank and I saw with my own eyes the rampant corruption of the Burnham era.  Elites connected to the PNC got "loans" and did not pay back ANYTHING in debt or even interest payments.  There is more rampant theft now because there is more to steal.  Not because the Burnham era elites weren't similarly rampant in their greed.

Folks can engage in pretense of innocent and guilty party as they wish.  Or they can engage in FUNDAMENTAL analysis of how institutions ought to be restructured ensuring that, where applicable, the BEST ideas of both the PPP and the PNC are incorporated.

Nagamootoo, Ramjattan and Trotman CANNOT offer themselves as innocent as ALL were present in those older parties and said NOTHING, until they became involved in personal confrontations with the leadership.  Trotman battling Corbin and losing, and Nagamootoo and Ramjattan being sidelined.

hahahhahhaahahahahaha comedy non stop pan GNI.....