EXPECTEDLY, the 2018 National Budget has received popular acceptance. In public relations terms, it was not only bigger but better, in many respects. At $267 billion, the budget is $46 billion bigger than that of 2015, when our coalition took office.
The budget cannot be faulted on size or on social content. It has a bottom-up framework, with something for everyone, starting from the grassroots.

As in any democracy there would be criticisms from a few interest groups, including the parliamentary opposition. The latter would belly-ache over what the budget does not include. However, it serves no useful purpose for an opposition to just make a morbid assessment of the budget and try to sell pie-in-the-sky prescriptions. A different strategy is needed for the changing times.

POSITIVE POLITICS
We need positive politics where the opposition would participate in, and not boycott, pre-budget consultations. The new times require bi-partisan cooperation in shaping the nation’s development and social agenda, not civil disobedience. The new times in the advent of an oil-and-gas economy, demand all-inclusive, national governance, not narrow, ethnic-driven agendas.

But, in my opinion, this will not happen. Not any time soon; not under the present opposition leadership. It needs a visionary leader who would look towards the future and not be pre-occupied with building ethnic fences to pre-empt or prevent possible prosecution for past wrongs. The better interests of the constituents of the opposition require engagement, not withdrawal.

CONSTRUCTIVE EXCHANGES
When the debate starts tomorrow the Guyanese people would expect civilised and constructive exchanges. They would expect not only criticisms, castigation and condemnation but practical suggestions and proposals on how our united country could move forward, faster.

The constructive nationalist approach becomes more appealing because several of the usual political whipping boys will not be available this time around. For example, the government cannot be flogged for a tax on private tuition fees, which has been removed. The opposition cannot whip up the issue of concessions to the mining, forestry and transportation sectors. These have been granted. And disclosures of government’s contract with oil-and-gas investors have been assured, which has blown away a whole lot of anticipated noises in the House.

WHIPPING BOY
The only whipping boy that is left is the sugar industry. There would be plenty crocodile tears from the opposition mourners who themselves had bankrupted the industry and broke its back with a debt of $85 billion. The chief pallbearer had predicted that “without Skeldon, sugar is dead.” He then poured, like water on a duck’s back, $50 billion ostensibly to modernise the Skeldon factory, but Guyanese didn’t get as much as a quack from that duck.

Another “duck” was slaughtered in 2011, long before the coalition came to office, when the LBI factory was shut down and then disguised as a measure to “integrate” LBI with Enmore operations. The cackle only started when GuySuCo decided five years later, to complete the “integration.”

Guyanese know only too well who has placed the sugar industry on life support. Guyanese would know also that to keep sugar alive our government in the last 30 months, rolled out $31 billion to GuySuCo which, additionally, raked in billions from sale of sugar lands.
Next year, government will dish out a further $6 billion to help GuySuCo regularise operations of three factories on five cane-producing estates.

CANDLE OF HOPE
I still hold the view that sugar will not fail if the industry is streamlined to get the best from both fields and factories, and peasant cane farmers and sugar workers are brought into the production chain. I am of the view still that former cane- cutters should be given redundant land to cultivate cash crops or manage fish farms. Today, I am lighting a candle of hope for sugar workers who would opt for self-employment.

But there needs to be a sincere will to see this happen. The unions and their political handlers don’t want sugar workers to be self-employed. They are content with cane-cutters languishing in the sugar fields.

Their mouthpiece, Guyana Times, is the new ideologue of the post-Jagan PPP. On Saturday, November 24, it argued that canecutters, even if provided land, cannot do other crops. They don’t have skills, it claimed,

And with acid contempt and dry mockery, it added: “These fellas are specialists whose work is so practiced and fluid that to look at them is to look at the Bolshoi Ballet performing Swan Lake!”
It then went on to describe the work of cane-cutters as “a thing of beauty to behold.” It scornfully ended with this asinine comment: “Ballet dancers can’t cultivate cash crops!”

INDEPENDENT PRODUCERS
However, the recommendation for sugar workers to be independent producers was made 130 years ago in 1887 by the West Indian Royal Commission. In advocating “peasant proprietors,” the Commission stated:

“It seems to us that no reform affords so good a prospect for the permanent welfare in the future of the West Indies as the settlement of the labouring population on the land as small peasant proprietors; and in many places this is the only means by which the population can in future be supported. …no other reform offers the same prospect of permanent, though possibly moderate prosperity, and of political stability…as the settlement of the native population as proprietors and cultivators of small portions of land…”

Workers should therefore have an option whether or not to cut canes. Times should tell students graduating from high schools with between 10 and 20 CXC subjects, that they too could become “ballet dancers” if they choose to cut canes. I bet that the off-spring of cane-cutters would rather enter universities or choose work involving technology than to be “ballerina dancers” on the stump-strewn, rugged and at times slippery mud-beds of the canefields.

WITHDRAW AND WALKOUT
The sugar industry has been bleeding but the unions have held on to their share of the soup, and they are determined to keep sugar workers tied up with cane-trash in order to collect weekly dues. Moving cane-cutters to independent cash- crop farming would take the morsel from the greedy mouths of the labour aristocrats and their political bosses.

This romantic spin that cane-cutters are ballet dancers on a Bolshoi Theatre stage, is pure crap. It is time that sugar workers tell the ethnic headhunters who feed on their present plight as political fodder to come off their backs!

Without being able to use sugar workers as their whipping boys, I suspect that the views of the opposition on the 2018 budget would be flat and dry, except for the eventual retreat, withdraw and walkout!