GUYSUCO is having a picket… But what about poor Rafik?
WEEKEND WITH FREDDIE
Kaieteur News
July 18, 2004
The board of GUYSUCO has taken a decision that as a company, it will join the two unions in the sugar industry, GAWU and NAACIE, in a joint picketing exercise tomorrow outside the embassy of the European Union in Kingston.
The three organisations are protesting the planned reduction of sugar prices by the EU. GUYSUCO says this will have a deleterious effect on the corporation’s resources and by extension, the economy of Guyana.
When I read in this very newspaper in the letter pages two brilliant exposés on unrestrained expenditure in GUYSUCO, my mind went back to the days of the good PPP, when the PPP was the revolutionary party fighting for the rights of the people of Guyana (or so they said).
People like this writer and an entire generation were fed on a diet of unrestrained hypocrisy.
The little faults of GUYSUCO under Burnham were maximised a thousand times over in the Mirror newspaper. We were told that Burnham was milking the sugar industry; that he was using the sugar levy to fatten the PNC administration.
But look at the story of GUYSUCO under the PPP/C since 1992. The PPP kept the sugar levy until last year. This meant that the monster that Burnham created in the sugar industry, the levy, which the PPP derogated as a blood-sucking Frankenstein, proved a useful companion to the PPP when it became the owner of Burnham’s laboratory.
For 10 years, the PPP Government kept the sugar levy after it came into power in 1992 but for 20 years, it fooled this nation and countless numbers of sugar workers by its graphic description of the levy being the dinosaur of Forbes Burnham that Desmond Hoyte found useless to keep.
From where I stand, Burnham’s Jurassic Park is very much preserved by the PPP Government.
The abolition of the levy last year no doubt was a strategic surrender because of the formidable pen of Ravi Dev. I am not a supporter of Mr. Dev’s party.
My belief system and the formations that shaped my upbringing and praxis put me in a different world of political activity to Mr. Dev’s but the arrival of Dev on the Guyanese scene has exposed the vulnerabilities of the PPP in a polity where two competing parties have to engage in extremist politics to retain their ethnic supporters.
So tomorrow, officials of GUYSUCO will be out on the picket line. But Mr. Rafik Mohamed should offer a counter picket right in front of the protestors.
What has GUYSUCO done to this man? Friday afternoon, I came out of the Kaieteur News offices and standing on the pavement was Dale Andrews, senior Kaieteur News reporter. He was talking to a middle-aged guy, and as I passed to get to my car, Dale told me he has a story for my column.
He introduced me to Mr. Mohamed. What follows is a story of a ruling party that has lost its way, and the tragedy of post-colonial rule.
In July 2003, Shafik Mohamed bought motor vehicle, PGG 1862, Skoda model at a GUYSUCO auction for $180,000. This was a model that was sold by Dr. Hughley Hanoman.
GUYSUCO bought a shipment some years ago from this PPP intimate. If Burnham and Hoyte had done that, the Mirror newspapers would have run a criticism for several months.
In September 2003, GUYSUCO gave Mr. Mohamed the certificate of compliance. After spending an additional $600,000, Mr. Mohamed, whose sole income derives from using the car as hire, went to the License Revenue Office for registration.
But he was refused because the officials there found that PGG 1862, registered under GUYSUCO’s name is not the same PGG 1862 that GUYSUCO sold Mr. Mohamed.
The chassis number and the engine number are not the same as when that car was originally registered by GUYSUCO.
The story appeared to have had a nice ending. But little did Mr. Mohamed know, a nightmare was waiting for him. Of course, GUYSUCO being a prestigious corporation would not try to exploit poor Rafik.
Rafik took in the car, and while examining other abandoned Skodas, it was discovered that another Skoda, PGG 190 had the same chassis number and engine number.
So Director Keith Ward agreed to take back the car and reimburse poor Rafik. Rafik met with the company secretary, Adriane De Souza, a recent law graduate and the matter was closed.
Ronald Ally, GUYSUCO’s Chairman, had a meeting with Rafik and in the presence of Finance Director Paul Bhim a cheque was to be prepared for Rafik.
The next morning, no cheque was there, and since then, Mr. Mohamed has been unable to see or talk to Adriane De Souza, Paul Bhim or Ronald Ali.
This was in January 2004. Since then, no one at GUYSUCO wants to speak to Rafik Mohamed. Poor Rafik turned to Donald Ramotar but they keep saying at Freedom House that he isn’t in office. Rafik then sought out Stabroek News. They assigned Oscar Clarke to cover the story but he has met with a brick wall.
Next, poor Rafik went to Kaieteur News publisher, Glenn Lall. Mr. Lall put Dale Andrews on the case. Dale’s fate is the same as Clarke’s. Dale and I took poor Rafik upstairs at Kaieteur News and we called all the relevant GUYSUCO officials. But no one wants to talk about, or to Rafik Mohamed.
Now these same persons who are refusing to pay Mr. Mohamed his “chicken feed” money are going to picket the EU mission tomorrow. It is wrong, unfair, insensitive for the European Union to reduce the price its pays GUYSUCO for its sugar.
But GUYSUCO sees nothing wrong when it refuses to pay a hire-car driver the money he needs to survive with his family. I hope there is a counter-picket and I will be in it for sure. I felt a strong tinge of hopelessness as I came down the steps of Kaieteur News with a dejected Mr. Mohamed.
I watched him vanish into a minibus, and sadness overcame me and I remembered my favourite verse on life written by the 17th Century English poet, John Dryden. It goes like this:
When I consider life, ‘tis all a cheat
Yet fool’d with hope, men favour the deceit
Trust on, and think tomorrow will repay
Tomorrow’s falser than the former day.