President Bharrat Jagdeo, obviously fed up with the constant carping of the detractors and the opportunistic opposition elements who relentlessly shoot down every project and programme that the government initiates that is  aimed at developing the people and the country, even during formative stages – all in pursuit of selfish and self-serving agendas, has said that he does not care what the chronic pessimists and doomsayers say about him;  but he needs to care, because the consequences have oftentimes proven detrimental to the people and country.
The devastation of the country inherited by the PPP/C is on record, with a bankrupted economy and a crippling debt burden that for years inhibited any pretence to stability and/or growth in the economy, indexed as poorest in the world, even below Haiti.
Today Guyana is ranked as a middle-income country on global graphs, with growth trends pointing skywards, and with the needs of every community and every sector being addressed to optimize performance and productivity, which will ultimately redound to further – even cataclysmic socio-economic progress in the nation.
Of course, pockets of poverty still exist, and sometimes the systems do not work effectively and people fall through the cracks but, by and large, Guyana is a country poised on the brink of great prosperity.
Yet the disingenuous predictors of doom and gloom continue to spill a deluge of verbal sewage, hoping to catch the unwary and the uninformed or ill-informed in their pool of filth congealing in the chasms of their convoluted minds.
The housing sector has provided hundreds of thousands of families with house lots, simultaneously creating for those families shelter and wealth; the LCDS has already benefited the nation, with hopefully more to come; the Grow More Food campaign has seen unparalleled activity in food production as farmers and producers seek to diversify their products through agro-processing, with consequential expanded export markets; the education and health sectors, as well as other social sectors, have been making gigantic strides that need volumes to chronicle; the President’s One Laptop Per Family project is a continuation of government’s drive to educate and empower people of all ages in line with global trends of technology and information dissemination;  Hydropower is on the cards to soon provide reliable energy to the nation at affordable prices; the private sector is expanding at unprecedented speeds and quantum; despite the suspicious rise in criminal activity, there is relative peace in the nation as the average Guyanese engages in normal pursuits; yet the blatantly dishonest criticisms do not abate, nor is there any retraction when their contentious allegations are proven to be misrepresentations of facts, or outright lies.
The latest diatribe by Christopher Ram, in which he harped on the Government’s interventions in the sugar sector, and applauded presidential aspirant David Granger’s proposal to privatise the sugar industry, is his normal excursion into opportunistic effluence, which nonetheless can spill over and taint and/or impede the impetus of the sugar sector’s turnaround plan.
Suggesting, in his usual misleading way – and among other erroneous things- that there were nefarious underpinnings to the award of the contract for the construction of the packaging plant and warehouse at Enmore to internationally-acclaimed engineering contractors, Surendra Engineering Corporation, with the suggestion of an alternative firm, using the Kenyan model, is an exquisite example of his unethical strategies to cast aspersions to every developmental initiative the Government undertakes.  He eschewed completely the fact that in a free-market and democratic system, which the PPP/C embraces, and which is always open to internal and external scrutiny, especially by international funding agencies, the process of choosing the executing agency for such a project followed international tendering norms and procedures.
The Government strategically supported two sectors with a visionary plan, which was to pay GuySuCo $4 billion for sugar lands that were no longer viable for sugar cultivation and convert these lands, through its housing ministry, into house lots.  This stratagem simultaneously boosted the administration’s home ownership drive and provided critical support to the sugar sector, which significantly benefited the working-class people of this country; yet the vitriol that has been spewed by the opposition forces on the government, especially targeting Housing Minister Irfaan Ali, denotes their utter contempt for the Guyanese people, especially the poor and working-class people of the land.
The sugar sector’s turnaround plan involves cost-cutting measures, which include closure of sugar cane cultivation at Diamond and optimizing cultivation at LBI and Enmore Estates in efforts to avoid several factories producing at minimal capacity, which would inflate operational costs.  This also came in for severe criticism.
However, President Jagdeo has said that the realities of the sugar sector must be considered in context.  There is no viable option but to sustain the sugar industry, despite the new and emerging challenges facing the sector, because of the reliance on sugar production of the thousands of people in the workforce who depend – directly and indirectly, on the sugar industry and its ancillary services for survival.
Private investors would not have a commitment to the workforce, and would not keep operational a problematic sector.  This would in turn send the number of the unemployed, with all its attendant problems, through the roof, which would, in turn, exacerbate all the related social and economic displacements in the country.
The horrendous fallout of such a catastrophic eventuality, among other considerations, would ensue in so much expenditure from the national purse that would make the amounts spent by Government on sustaining the industry pale by comparison.
Visionary strategies that are pro-poor and pro-growth have hallmarked successive PPP/C administrations, unlike the self-serving strategies of political opportunists who have once before wasted this nation’s resources and devastated the Guyanese people, and who are fighting tooth and nail to enter the corridors of power once more so that they can wreak their destructive policies once more in this country.