GUYANA: The clay brick factory was also a failed Chinese project

Dear Editor,

With the Skeldon factory mentioned again in the newspaper, I was musing over similar experiences shared by Mr Burnham and Mr Jagdeo with regard to failed projects built by Chinese contractors.

Three or four years ago a friend and I visited the now defunct clay brick factory in West Demerara. The complex consisted of offices made of clay brick and several impressively long and wide open-sided greenheart framed sheds with corrugated metal roofs. The buildings all seemed in good condition in spite of the little or no maintenance they received since the factory closed its gates more than thirty years ago.

One shed contained the collapsed main kiln and littered around was what seemed to be nineteenth century vintage machinery layered with rust. Standing next to the shed was a trestle mounted rusted-out steel tank, which convinced me that the tank was made of the same inferior quality steel that was used to manufacture the machinery.

In hindsight I now realize it must have been a challenge for management, cursed with such an inferior and archaic plant to keep the factory running economically, and not surprisingly it closed long before it was supposed to. To this day you can hear the ‘gaff’ along Canal Polder 2 road: “Burnham put square peg in round hole to run clay brick factory.” No doubt Burnham knew who took on the square pegs, but being the gentleman he was, he kept silent about this.

Fast forward to Mr Jagdeo and the Skeldon sugar factory. Well Mr Jagdeo, being no gentleman squarely put the blame for the failure of the factory on the designers, the contractors as well as those who came after to try and clean up the mess. Like Burnham, Jagdeo knows he was taken for a ride, but unlike Burnham, he made and keeps making a lot of noise about it.

This should be a warning to all subsequent presidents when dealing with Chinese contractors. One contractor built us a hotel which like the Skeldon factory has faults, so that Chinese are still knocking around the site in Kingston trying to rectify this, that and the other. Presently there is a second company stripping our land of its timber resources. Then there is a third working at Timehri airport.

Yours faithfully,

Edward Gonsalves

Source: The Stabroek News