Introduction
There is sufficient national sentiment today for there to be some serious introspection over these last 16 months. So while the ruling class got their feet fully immerse into understanding the challenges of administering a nation, the working class was able to establish performance patterns of their government.
What is absolutely clear is that the poor and the working class are still deeply exposed to mass acts of economic exploitation similar to what they experienced in the latter years of the PPP. I want to focus on three cases of working class exploitation over the last 16 months – exploitation of the sugar workers, the market vendors, and the public servants.
As we can see the exploitation does not have a racial face, although some Indo-centric racist elements have been attempting to milk the exploitation from that angle. But they are wrong. This war is being carried out against the working class from all races by the present day ruling class.
The Class Struggle and the Guyanese Working Class
If one observes the Granger administration, one can unearth that it is a government grounded in reactionary policy making. As a result, too many good dollars are lost on too many bad projects. Such incompetence depletes the patrimony of the Guyanese working class.
I observed a letter from one Nigel Hinds on the wages issue, who is a senior functionary in the Granger government. His cogitations exhibited this ill-informed school of thought that the Guyanese man is now better off than he was a year ago. Certainly not Nigel!
Note, I said a year ago since I choose not to compare the pre-May 2015 to the post-May 2016 eras. Rather my period of comparison is the early months of the Granger administration vs. the latter months. If one reflect on this 16 months period, one can observe a progressive dilution of the economic well-being of the working man.
We are having bigger budgets every year but clearly these budgets are not working for the poor man because of two main reasons. One the respective Ministries are not competently the dollars assigned to it in order to leverage the greatest value for money spent due to the political muddle in the Granger cabinet. Secondly, because of our very best continue to run away from Guyana, we have a capacity crisis in the public service, which makes under spending a common occurrence.
Yet the Granger administration chooses to play games with the stakeholders. Let me illustrate this position with real examples.
Sugar Workers
What has happen in the sugar belt is a gross dereliction of duty by the Granger administration to the workers since Guysuco does not only needs money but more importantly leadership. Guysuco does not need theoreticians and inflexible managers but turnaround specialists and “transformationist” who are able to effectively engage and communicate an aspiration; a vision and mission and motivate the workers to become more productive.
Today, there is a great divide between the workers and the management. Until and unless the senior management frame the problem within the context of the financial statements and communicate the real issues constantly with the pertinent stakeholders like the workers and their unions, we are engaging in a sort of nebulous game around structures and processes that will not bear the kind of fruits the industry deserves. The end results, the industry will burn up more billions as it regresses to the point where the alternatives will become fewer and fewer.
Time is of the essence and failure to transform the industry will result in the greatest dilution of wealth ever in the history of Guyana. With less than 4 months to closure, neither the Parliament nor the workers are clear on the Wales Estate Strategic Plan. Now we are told about some harebrained scheme that is geared to planting rice on sugar lands. That is an absolute waste of good money when the rice markets are flat. How worst can it get?
Market Vendors
I am 100% in support of the Granger administration cleaning up Georgetown especially the Stabroek Square but the options provided to the mainly female Afro-Guyanese vendors were just ludicrous. Here we have a government struggling to spend its G$230,000,000,000 budget, but yet there is no vision for the Stabroek Wharf and the surrounding areas.
How come the Minister of Public Infrastructure, Mr. Patterson can find some G$650 million to build a Parade Ground at Durban Park that has little use for the people of Guyana except for special holidays, but he cannot find the funds to refurbish and expand the Stabroek Market to offer a cleaner and more market friendly environment?
There is no action plan, no vision, no program, no milestone, and therefore the deliverables will be sketchy at best. This performance is synonymous to putting glorified clerks to become CEOs in the respective Ministries.
Money is fungible and it matters not which Ministry spends the money, once it is spent transparently following the Procurement Laws. The end product is a well lit, well secured, double decker mall at the back of Stabroek, which can be designed to capture the foot traffic passing through the square.
These are basic ideas but yet because of this disconnect between the ruling class and the working class, such projects will struggle to see the day of light while ardent supporters of the Coalition government are left for “economic-dead” at the back of Parliament.
Public Servants
I have said time and time again, if there is anything President Jagdeo got right, it was the timing of the public servant payout. I may not agree with his methodology but the workers were religiously granted a “tap-up” at the most celebrated holiday period. Every race, religion and age group spends and celebrates the December season. Christmas was a time for friends and family and when it comes to friends and family the Guyanese people loves to spend. So why to deny them their annual act of historical materialism?
It was Marx who exposed us to the concept that “man enter into relationships of production and it is the totality of these relationships which creates the economic structure of the society”. The Granger administration dismantled this historical economic structure of distributing funds to the working class at the most opportune time and replaced it with unpredictable cash flows. That is just plain misery for the working class. Such a decision injected great class conflict into the society. Unpardonable!
Conclusion
Today the Guyanese society is fragmented with deep class contradictions. This frontal assault and flank maneuver by the ruling class on the working class will have dire consequence for the nation as a whole. Everyone who is not in the ruling class is exposed to a sort of “Fabian Strategy” with an intention of wearing them down into subservience using a strategy of periodic starvation. But such actions always fail because the economy will vegetate.
We are already seeing signs of this slow down because you cannot economically ambush the working class, be they soldiers, market vendors, teachers, nurses, policemen, public servants, or sugar and bauxite workers. As the workers get a lesser portion of the budget, they will rebel by withholding their labour.
What we are seeing today under Team Granger is a carbon copy of what we saw under Team Ramotar. With 16 months gone, what is next for the working class? More economic misery? Time for change! Time to rebuild Guyana!
