OPINION: Eyewitness

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Hustling…

…sugar workers

Stung by the electoral implications of their cold-blooded treatment of sugar workers – both the ones fired and the ones left to swing in the wind – the PNC and their myrmidons have unleashed a two-pronged misdirection initiative. The first prong claims – as Volda Lawrence and Aubrey Norton did– that the PPP didn’t use EU-provided funds to mitigate the damage from their 36% slash in sugar prices.

Now you know these inveterate liars are just drawing a red herring over the bloody trail of their closure of 4 sugar estates and throwing 7000 workers into the streets. How could they accuse the PPP of not directing these funds into sugar to cause its demise and at the same time, accuse the same PPP of “pandering” to sugar workers by subsidising the industry to the tune of “billions and billions” year after year? Which subsidy, they claim, was the reason they had to shutter the said estates!!

So which is it?? The PPP withheld money or spent money on sugar?? The PNC can’t have it both ways!! The accusation sounds just like those about the PPP “siphoning off billions and billions” from the Treasury. But after five years, has had every case brought on these accusations thrown out of court!! We know the PNC is incompetent…but even the big-time lawyers they hired?? How many times are they going to cry wolf to a bemused citizenry??

The other prong was just floated (we can’t say “launched”!) by the AFC’s Raphael Trotman, who has defied the folk wisdom that “you can’t go back home”!! Referring to the sugar workers fired by the PNC – which his erstwhile party founder Ramjattan boasted was their brainchild! – Trotman claimed: “With oil coming, we will transition most, if not all, those workers in the sugar industry…Quite a few have been already retrained or are being retrained… We had trained about 100 sugar workers at the Port Mourant Training Centre, and most of them have been hired by ExxonMobil or its subsidiaries”.

7000 persons fired since 2016-17 and Trotman is boasting about ONE HUNDRED retrained in their much publicised Industry Skills Training Enhancement Programme (IN-STEP)?? How many times are they going to pull out this chestnut since the training in 2018?? Can Trotman say exactly how many of these “retrained” workers were actually HIRED by Exxon or its suppliers?? After all, we know that the private outfit TotalTec had to give about a dozen ex-GuySuCo technical personnel further FURTHER training to meet the O&G standards!!

But we know this is all BS. Why hasn’t the PNC replicated for sugar workers on abandoned sugar lands the G$2.6Billion agri-scheme they unfurled behind Ithaca, Buxton, BV and Mocha??

Why different strokes…?

…civilians

What your Eyewitness found most interesting about the “Mona and Tina” video that went so viral it ended up even in his inbox, was how so few persons commented on the Police’s behaviour even as they lambasted the two young women. Now the Police are supposed to “serve and protect” we civilians, did you know that?? Of course, you don’t— if you’ve had even the slightest encounter with any member of the GPF.

Have you ever been pulled over by a cop for a supposed infraction on the road and hauled to the station?? Have you ever experienced the complete helplessness they impose on you at the station? The disdain? Your Eyewitness found the response to the bullying of the two women quite spunky, under the circumstances and hope there will be a full investigation.

Are the Police going to be charged for invading the privacy of the two women by uploading their video on the internet?? Why weren’t the women allowed to video the Police?

Free Mona and Tina!!

…on the “troubles”

Granger now says he doesn’t have evidence to even order a CoI into all the massacres between 2000 and 2008 for which the PNC’s been blaming the PPP.

So with all his connections in the security apparatus, it’s nothing but hearsay??

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