A tragedy of epic proportions

Inevitably, the politics of sugar is playing out; and just as inevitably, given the nature of politics in Guyana, it is taking the form of a tragedy – a tragedy of epic proportions. Sadly, it has been a tragedy that was enacted many times in our history, and its form was established coterminous with the foundation of the country back in the seventeenth century.
Sugar cultivation and extraction was labour-intensive, and had to be cheaply available on demand at specific times of the year. African slavery “solved” this problem, but at costs that are still being extracted in broken psyches and structural underdevelopment one hundred and eight-four years after slavery was abolished. The bound labour from Madeira, the West Indies, intercepted slave ships from Africa, India and China that were sourced to provide the labour after the freed slaves balked were interpellated in the exploitative structural relations into the present by the logic of the undertaking and the specificities of Guyana’s history and geography.
In the pre-independence era, being the most exploited labour force, sugar workers played a pivotal role across the British West Indian colonies through their protests against their working conditions, which had a political impact, since the British sugar and British colonialism were coterminous. Labour in general, and sugar labour in particular, therefore constituted the earliest political mobilisation in the Caribbean, and was the incubator of practically all the political parties.
In Guyana, because of the aforementioned early labour history, sugar workers by then were primarily, but not exclusively, Indian Guyanese, since most of the freed Africans and other indentured labourers had moved out. With the widening of democracy consequent to the introduction of the universal franchise, Indian Guyanese constituted a significant bloc of potential voters. The beginning of the modern version of Guyana’s tragedy was when the independence movement split and the two early political leaders — Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham — made “rational choice” decisions in mobilisation, which created an ethnically divided polity. Sugar workers, for instance, supported the PPP, while bauxite workers supported the PNC.
When the post-independence PNC Government decided to nationalise the sugar industry in 1976, the move was supported by the PPP, but the union representing sugar workers – GAWU, affiliated with the PPP — was not given official recognition by the Government — just as it had not been so given by British sugar. The sugar workers staged a massive 135-day strike, which saw the PNC call out its supporters and members of paramilitary forces to break the strike. While GAWU was eventually recognised, relations between sugar workers and management became a trope for relations between the PPP and the Government. This situation was polarised further, since rigging of elections removed any political initiative by the PPP in the formal political arena.
By 1990, when the IMF forced the PNC Government to introduce a foreign management firm to increase sugar production, this had fallen to one-third of the colonial high point, and workers were tragically impoverished, ironically exacerbated by alcohol, a by-product of sugar. Sugar workers felt they had been victimised by the PNC for their political support of the PPP — especially since all sugar profits had been removed by a PNC-imposed sugar levy since 1974, and the industry was allowed to fall into disrepair.
When the PPP did not follow the IMF recommendation to privatise the sugar industry, but instead embarked on a Strategic Modernisation Plan crafted in 1998, they were accused of “playing politics”. The Skeldon component of that modernisation proved to be an albatross that further wounded the industry. The latest episode in the ongoing tragedy — in which the Government ignored its own CoI recommendation to stabilise the industry within three years and then privatise it — can only be explained in political terms, especially when the President boasted that his government “placed people before profits”.
But firing 5,700 workers and their 30,000 dependents is not just a tragedy for the workers; it is one that can rip apart Guyana, because of the political ramifications.