Guards of Honour in ceremonial dress were posted in front of a dais. There was a loud drumroll from the Guyana Police Force band as the nation’s Executive President mounted the platform, the Prime Minister standing at his side. Nearby, under a tent, several members of the Diplomatic Corps were seated. Behind them was a not-too-packed, and not so-enthusiastic civilian audience.
They all stood for the National Anthem, “Dear Land of Guyana…”
ENMORE MARTYRS’ DAY
It was June 16, and it all seemed set for the solemn observance of the 77th anniversary of Enmore Martyrs’ Day. The martyrs – Lallabagie, Harry, Pooran, Rambarran and Surujballi – were murdered by colonial police that day in 1948.
The martyrs’ demands included better conditions of work, in short, fair play. Their sacrifices inspired the fight for electoral and industrial democracy, and the struggle against colonialism for political independence. Those became the historic gains of all our people, mainly the working class.
With full display and open use of state resources, it was a day for harmony. Yet, inexplicably the Enmore Martyrs Day became an elections campaign event.
It was not unlike other public events, on which taxpayers’ monies have been lavished, and for which public servants were used as props and the state-owned media served as propaganda mouthpieces. Defectors were displayed in the front rows.
BANANA SPLIT
It is, they say, the period of political mockery. Defections seem in style, like a banana split. Some jump from opposition parties to the ruling autocracy; others cross from one opposition party to another. A few leave to form parties of their own. There are so far 28 parties in the 2025 race.
And when in the “traditional” opposition stronghold, Linden, the government hurled like coloured beads into a Mardi Gras crowd, $10 billion to first-time contractors literally on the eve of fresh elections, that was not political bribery. Two months before elections? You gotta be kidding me!
At Enmore, President Ali was introduced by a party zealot inter alia as “our Comrade Leader”. Just before that, the head of GAWU, pledged his union’s endorsement for Ali’s re-election. That, in cricket parlance, was a heavy roller on the pitch for the hostile political balls to come.
EVERY CITIZEN, A SOLDIER
The victims of his theatrical frenzy were his absent political opponents. His agitated hands slashed the sacrilegious peaceful space at the base of the Enmore Martyrs’ Monument.
That Monument was commissioned on June 16, 1977, by then Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham. It was a time of peaceful co-existence between the arch-rivals Cheddi Jagan (PPP) and Forbes Burnham (PNC). In 1973 the PPP declared “critical support” for Burnham’s administration. In 1977 the PPP proposed the formation of a national front and a national front government between the two parties. That courtship didn’t last.
Those transient symbolisms of a search for unity have long disappeared. The old slogan, “every citizen, a soldier” in face of feared aggression, has been dumped. In its place are flags strung on electric poles on the roadway. “Every post, a soldier” seemed to be the new unwritten mantra.
SUGAR IN TROUBLE
In the over-heated outbursts, distortion of facts polluted the Enmore air like estate bagasse.
The eerie echo was that the APNU-AFC government made 7,000 sugar workers redundant, and didn’t pay them redundancy benefits.
During 2016-17, under the Coalition, 4,763 sugar workers became redundant when the industry was restructured. Though initially delayed, redundancy payments amounted to $7 billion. Some 11,000 workers were retained at the remaining factories.
The Coalition did not invent redundancy in the industry. Back in 1992 when the PPP took office, there were some 28,000 sugar workers on the payroll at the eleven (11) estates. Along the way successive administrations downsized the workforce by some 11,000 workers, including those from Ogle, Enmore and LBI estates.
In 2010 when Diamond estate was closed by the Jagdeo government, GAWU took court action to get payments for the redundant sugar workers. That provoked the PPP bosses. GAWU was threatened with derecognition.
I was on the edge of being expelled from the PPP after I wrote an article, “Light a Candle for Sugar Workers” in which I condemned the bully/terror tactics against a union whose recognition forms part of the protracted struggles and sacrifices of sugar workers, including the Enmore Martyrs.
That is not to say that the PPP administration did not try to rescue the industry, which had seen hard times under the previous Burnham-Hoyte regimes. Sugar was saddled with an $85 billion debt. The PPP government was forced to give it life support in the amount of $48 billion. That created ethnic unease among other sections of the working people.
Faced with rising cost of production (50 US cents per pound as against the selling price 16 cents per pound), Jagdeo threw some G$40 billion to modernize the Skeldon factory. Jagdeo said that sugar was dead without it. But Skeldon nevertheless became a white elephant.
When the coalition took over, sugar was on life support. It threw some $47 billion into rescue packages (about one billion per month), and made available a bank loan of $30 billion to re-organise the surviving estates. That process was cut short when the PPP removed the Coalition by a treacherous no-confidence vote just over three years into its elected term.
POWER OF THE PEOPLE
Again, new dangers lurk for the sugar industry. A far cry from the PPP’s promised production of 500,000 tons of sugar, last year the target was scaled down to just below 70,000 tons. By October 2024 the industry was producing about 40% of its reduced targets at a time when the cost of production skyrocketed to US$1.31 per pound as against the selling price of 0.35 cents. On December 21, the government threatened that “heads will roll”.
As this is the silly season of electioneering, the PPP is keeping its axe under the bed. Instead, the oligarchy is making sugary promises couched in deceptive words such as “revitalization”, “mechanization”, “modernization” and “management changes”.
Without reopening the closed estates as promised five years ago, the PPP is spinning fresh illusions. It had coined its own MEGA slogan, to “make sugar great again” by taking sugar out of the industry. The focus will be on “other crops”.
But sugar workers will see through the gaffe. If not now, later. They know all too well from their own struggles that “the power of the people is greater than the people in power!”
July 21, 2025
