Latest update April 20th, 2024 12:59 AM
Nov 27, 2016 Letters
Dear Editor,
In June 2015, Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo at the Enmore Martyr’s Day event spoke about the appointment of the Commission of Inquiry for Guysuco and emphasized that ‘the Commission will not sit in an office. It will go to every estate and it will talk to the sugar workers and find out from them what can be done to save sugar’. Yet the findings of this COI are now thrown aside. The Commission of Inquiry was set up and $52million taxpayers’ money was spent to find the answers and to save the sugar industry. It was headed by Mr. Vibert Parvattan and comprised nine members which included Mr. John D. Dow (Guysuco’s Factory Operations), Mr. Joseph Alfred (Factory Operations) and Mr. George James (Sugar Processing).
The Report of this Commission was submitted in October 2015 and it took more than one year after for the Chairman of the Guysuco Board to come to the conclusion that the Skeldon Factory is a ‘ticking time bomb.’ The Report made a number of recommendations but I want to draw attention to pages 22-30 of the Agriculture section.
It was recommended that the Capital requirements for the entire Guysuco will be approximately $26 billion from 2016 to 2020. Out of this amount Skeldon was budgeted for $5.2 million US while Uitvlugt, Albion and Rose Hall Rose will require US$6.9 million- a CDB soft loan for harvesting and leveling equipment. Nowhere did it mention that the Skeldon Factory was falling apart and that it was a ‘ticking time bomb’. In fact just a while ago the same factory was grinding 260 tonnes of cane per hour and both Guysuco and the Government bragged about it. It was getting closer to the 350TCH it was built for. Even the TC/TS had improved.
It must be noted that the US5.2 million budgeted for Skeldon from 2016 to 2020 was for:
– Accessibility and cane transport
– Civil structures
– Drainage and irrigation
– Mechanization
– Tillage and planting.
Is it not an anomaly that no money was allocated to fix a factory which was falling apart? Again, was it deliberately allowed to become ‘a ticking time bomb’? If so then the objective is obvious. This is so even though the COI’s Terms of Reference specifically targeted the ‘Factory Operations’. The Report itself did not mention the state of the machinery and equipment at the Skeldon Factory. I wish to submit that if they were in a deplorable condition at that time then the Report would have highlighted that fact but again they were not. Therefore, the time frame when the audit by the ‘international firm’ was done and the COI Report in October 2015 would again suggest that the deplorable state of the Skeldon Factory occurred after the COI was done and not before.
Furthermore, the audit highlighted the following findings:
– Deteriorating bagasse plant
– Missing insulation from the plant’s diffuser
– Problems with the boiler fuel feeders
– Frequency converters for bagasse feeder motors missing and not working due to lack of spares
– Conveyor feeder junction box and connection boxes in deplorable conditions
– Exhaust gas leakages
– Boiler platform corroded
– Oil burners demolished
– Insulators for the boilers in a deplorable state
– Furnace walls tubes need replacement
– Superheat tubes damaged
– Lack of spares prevent crucial repairs
– Alarming level of corrosion to various parts of the factory.
All the findings above highlighted gross neglect and the lack of repairs and maintenance during the past 17 months and can be seen as a deliberate ploy to run down the factory to justify its sale.
Moreover, the same Audit Report gave several reasons for this sad state of affairs at the Skeldon Factory. Some of these are:
– Incompetence of the plant operating personnel to operate and maintain the power plant
– No concept for maintenance planning or spare parts management
– General lack of spares and tools at site concerning all areas (mechanical spares, electrical spares, normal hand tools, measuring equipment, safety equipment, etc.)
– No conservation concept to maintain the equipment such as steam turbines during shut down time.
From the above audit findings, it is clear that preventative maintenance is sorely lacking and even routine repairs and maintenance were not done in a timely manner so how can we not expect the factory to deteriorate to its current state? This is not about ‘steel and iron’ it’s about repairs and maintenance. In addition, the COI has highlighted several factors which have contributed to the Skeldon Estate as a whole and as the former Agriculture Auditor for the East Berbice Estates, I am acutely aware of the prevalence of these negative factors. Some of these are:
– Poor quality of tillage
– Timing of planting (timing and sequence of operations)
– Shortages of inputs
– Chronic weed competition
– Burning to grinding intervals beyond 72 hours in many instances
– Shortage of labour
– Poor cane quality due to a high percentage of over aged canes
– Delays in crop start resulting in harvesting in wet rainy conditions resulting in a high percentage of extraneous matters and mud being delivered to the factory, again affecting sugar recoveries and the quality of sugar
– Poor drainage
A point to note is the claim made by Minister Trotman that ‘the US200 million Skeldon factory never generated one kilowatt of power’. This is a joke. Can the Government or Guysuco please tell us exactly what the fate of the Skeldon Estate is?
Haseef Yusuf
Where is the BETTER MANAGEMENT/RENEGOTIATION OF THE OIL CONTRACTS you promised Jagdeo?
Apr 20, 2024
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