Dear Editor,
When I read this headline, “Sometimes my children wake up hungry and all I can do is cry”, I could not believe what this Coalition Government has done to the lives of the hardworking sugar workers of this country. How can our President and his plethora of hardly-working ministers digest their 50 per cent salary increases? How can they still regurgitate the worthless ‘good life’ mantra, which now represents an insult to anyone with an iota of intelligence or reasoning?
In 2015, both the President and the Prime Minister had pledged that the ‘sugar industry is too big to fail’, and that no sugar estate will be closed. The Government-sponsored CoI, which was completed in October 2015, had endorsed this stance. The PPP had warned that this is sheer hypocrisy, and that the Coalition Government would use the scalpel destructively to extract their pound of flesh from the sugar workers.
However, just two months after the CoI was completed and made public, the guillotine fell on the Wales Sugar Estate; and the following year, Rose Hall, Enmore and Skeldon estates were added to the casualty list. The sugar workers have become expendables, they were ‘raiders of the Treasury’, according to Moses Nagamootoo, their erstwhile ‘champion’, who is now enjoying the ‘fat cat’ status , a term he had coined to describe the previous Government but now aptly fits his.
In their haste to castigate the sugar workers, who are deemed to be PPP members and supporters, the Coalition made a great tactical blunder that not only destroyed the economies of the various communities and the country as a whole, but irreparably damaged their reputation, which will not only serve to decimate their support in this LG Election, but in the 2020 General Election as well. Humpty Dumpty had fallen!
The tales of sorrow and woe of the dismissed sugar workers, Eon Collymore and his wife Melissa Sinclair, are reverberating throughout the communities of Wales, Rose Hall, Enmore and Skeldon. Parents and children are forced to live in dire poverty, struggling daily to have meals on the table, and school is becoming a distant memory for some. Even those sugar workers who are employed in the operational estates are having a rough time, since they have not received any wage increase since 2015, and many benefits have been snatched from them.
Why are the cries of the dismissed sugar workers not heeded by this Government? Is it because they feel that these people did not vote for them?
But alas! Not only are the dismissed sugar workers suffering, but all those who were dependent on them: the taxi drivers, the vendors, the businessmen, the carpenters and other tradesmen. The ripple effect is terrifying. How is it that the social and economic impacts of the closure of these estates were ignored?
The European Union, in its National Adaptation Strategy, had specifically stated that the Government must support the livelihoods of workers who are going to be negatively affected by the sugar reforms. This ‘good life’ Government ignored this stipulation.
The National Adaptation Strategy has implied that workers must be paid their severance to buffer any hardships which are bound to accrue after losing their jobs. Let us, for a moment, pause and put ourselves in the position of the worker who has lost his job, does not have a saving, owes money to creditors or the bank, has a family to take care of, and has not received his severance pay. A few workers have committed suicide because of this, while others have been reduced to begging. Moreover, those who owe the bank are being pressured to find the loan installments. The underperforming loans are now on the increase, as the economy is shrinking uncontrollably. All this is happening while the Government is illegally withholding the severance of many of the dismissed sugar workers. This is most heartless!
Then amidst protest by sugar workers, many of whom are yet to receive their full severance pay, the President has the temerity to tell the Skeldon residents, “You are the commercial capital of Berbice.” This is preposterous! Skeldon, New Amsterdam and Rose Hall are dying municipalities under this Government. They have been relegated to ‘ghost town’ status. I do submit that the President should have used the past tense!
The President seems to be an expert in empty rhetoric, tired clichés and boring platitudes! His speech writers need to be fired!
I am calling on this Government to visit these dying communities and to fully comprehend the adverse social and economic impact resulting from their unconscionable and obscene haste to shut down the four estates.
Yours sincerely,
Haseef Yusuf
RDC Councillor, Region 6