THE revelations by the President and General Secretary of GAWU, the sugar union, of how the APNU+AFC government treated the union and the sugar workers after the closure of the estates were shockingly sad.

Speaking on the Gildarie-Freddie Kissoon Show, the two men revealed that when union members were marching against the closure in Skeldon, the police prevented them from using a bullhorn.

Use of a bullhorn is something I saw every day in protest/demonstration, from my youthful days against rigged election in 1968 right up to the day the police stopped the union members in 2017.

The two men also stated that when union members were picketing the Office of the President on the same issue on Vlissingen Road, the police ordered them to move backwards on the eastern parapet, so they were very close to the trench and yet the police kept moving them further to the point where they would have fallen into the trench.
As it relates to the retrenched workers, the union leaders told us that to make a living, the workers began fishing on the abandoned estates. They were required to pay $500. Shortly after, they were completely banned.

This was happening to sugar workers in a coalition government in which one of the parties was named the Working People’s Alliance (WPA). Imagine that party had in its title, the words, “working people.”

So who were the leaders in the government after 2015? Four men that I functioned with for working class liberation in the 1970s when I was a university student. They were: Dr. Clive Thomas, Dr. Rupert Roopnarine, Tacuma Ogunseye and Dr. Maurice Odle. Outside of Cheddi Jagan, Janet Jagan and Walter Rodney, the two most known anti-Burnham activists in the 1970s were Thomas and Roopnaraine.

I did not know about these particular mistreatments of GAWU leaders and the retrenched workers at the time. If I did, I would have certainly done a denunciatory column. I broke with the AFC from day one when they got into government.

The former Mayor of Georgetown did not know that. He can Google the Freddie Kissoon column from May 2015 to March 2020 and he would see a daily fulmination against the APNU+AFC regime. In 360 columns a year, from May 2015 to March 2020 would be just under two thousand columns.
Today, the name Rupert Roopnarine has disappeared from the radar. Dr. Clive Thomas writes a weekly column in the Stabroek News in which he dwells on esoteric subjects. He never touches the APNU+AFC era in power.

Roopnaraine, I am told has just finished a book on his parliamentary speeches. I doubt the collection would carry anything on why in Parliament, he voted against the publication of the Walter Rodney Commission report.

I was livid when those revelations were made on the programme. How could the APNU+AFC deny the sugar union the use of a bullhorn in a picket exercise, when there are dozens of photographs of Roopnaraine using a loud speaker in the long fight for free and fair election?

I was there in that long struggle and I know we used bullhorns right up to the 2015 when the PPP lost power. The police under Burnham and successive PPP presidents did not stop demonstrators from speaking with a bullhorn

African Guyanese have turned away completely from African leaders in the opposition including the PNC and people like Ogunseye, Thomas and Roopnaraine because their eyes have been opened.

The same Ogunseye who masquerades as an African liberator was part of a government that denied retrenched sugar workers their right to fish to bring food on the table at sugar estates that were abandoned.

Clive Thomas has labelled his cash grant from oil revenues, the “Buxton Proposal.” This is a deliberate ploy to use the name Buxton to appeal to African Guyanese.
See my rejection of Thomas’ ethnic subliminal use of the term in my October 7, 2021 column captioned, “The Buxton Proposal: Subliminal ethnic instinct” and see my July 23, 2022 article of the counter-revolutionary betrayal of working class interest by Thomas and Roopnaraine with the headline,, “The betrayal of Walter Rodney and Franz Fanon.”
The same Thomas that uses the term Buxton to cajole African Guyanese has never apologised for being a part of a coalition government that banned retrenched sugar workers from fishing to make a living.

My desk is just in front of my library so in typing this column, I swung around the chair to look at two books that have reduced Thomas and Roopnaraine to nothingness in this country. One is Roopnaraine’s book, The Sky’s Wild Noise and the other is, Clairmont Chung’s Walter Rodney: A Promise of Revolution in which Thomas spoke of his struggle against Burnham. Sometimes some people are made of straw.