Latest update March 29th, 2024 12:59 AM
Dec 12, 2014 Letters
Dear Editor,
This writer recalls the halcyon days of that major part of the industry when owned and managed by Bookers Sugar Estates. Despite the persistent onslaught of strikes the management team was still upbeat, confronting the challenges and surmounting the hurdles. Rather than be discouraged, they were stimulated with renewed energy to conquer the obstacle course that was life in the sugar industry.
Morale was hardly diminished, and unlike these murky days, there was openness in communication vertically and laterally. Team spirit was key.They would shout at the climate and challenge it to slow production. Humans were seen and treated as the primary resources they were. So much so that when in the years its economy was down and there had to be cutbacks in expenditure, one fundamental edict was issued: ‘Do not cut back on training. The skills are our future’.
So one made a career in the industry. There are still several of those senior managers alive and available to provide today’s GuySuCo with the institutional memory, as well as relevant skills, the industry so desperately lacks. Their names and profiles have already appeared in these columns, as well as having been made known to successive Ministers of Agriculture. From the aural evidence however it would appear that the current dispensation is not attuned to Guyanese who speak its own English, to help, indeed to lead GuySuCo in the right direction.
Instead the glaring preference, following Booker Tate, has been for a multilingual grouping – Chinese, Indian, South African, from whom the extant locals obviously have not learnt, and have gained little.
Now, not for the first time, we are considering closing the geographic gap, by inviting a forlorn regional industry to assist us – in Spanish. Few would remember the earlier announcement to employ Cuban sugar boilers some years ago. Despite their non-arrival GuySuCo has not since complained of the performance of their own teams.
Which brings me back to those halcyon days referred to at the beginning. It was Guyanese sugar boilers and process foremen who I was mandated to select and send respectively to Nigeria, Zambia, and Tanzania to train their locals as Bookers set up sugar factories there. Their impact was most impressive and the transmission of skills so effective that within an unexpectedly brief period those factory positions were operated by locals.
Incidentally, if I am not mistaken, there was a relevant start-up course emanating from the Apprentice Training school at Port Mourant. All in English.
But there should be pause to reflect on the communication process within (without), the GuySuCo Administration, and enquire whether the conversation in Cuba was in fact initiated through the technical management team and the Board of GuySuCo. Or whether it was an off-the-cuff commentary arising from an innate sense of inadequacy?
For one thing it is unlikely that with the Cubans in charge they would ever agree to pay incentive (bonus) for well publicised under-production of the industry. They would have argued that such action only served to confirm management’s satisfaction with a level of mediocrity that is reflective of their own performance.
Worse, it also reflects the quality of management’s relationship with the Unions whose empathy or understanding the former cannot win in any discourse on the cost of production in relation to the price of sugar on the market. How can such increases be tolerated in a serious business management context? One must also ask of the role and responsibility of the Board in this connection; and for that matter, for the human behaviours in the industry. For what are its members, individually and severally accountable?
In the absence of any articulate response, one can only determine that they may well be irrelevant of the decision-making process. In the meantime the Brazilians would most likely be relieved at not being considered as the last resort of foreign technical assistance to a depreciating project.
E.B. John
THIS IDIOT TELLING GUYANA WE HAVE NO SAY IN THE 50% PROFIT SHARING AGREEMENT WE HAVE WITH EXXON.
Mar 29, 2024
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