The Guyana Power and Light Company (GPL) faces a crisis of what appears to be huge proportions. We have learnt from the company’s Chairman Winston Brassington at what was quite obviously a hastily arranged press conference last Friday that with effect from January 1, 2008 electricity tariffs would be increased by between 6 and 20 per cent. We also learnt that continually rising fuel cost was responsible for the GPL having to increase electricity charges and also that the company expected to lose one billion dollars last year.

Since electricity accounts for a high percentage of operating costs at both the domestic and commercial levels we can expect an increase in the cost of living that will go beyond actual electricity tariffs. Consumers will also have to pay more for manufactured goods and for other goods and services the provision of which have an electricity-related component. From the standpoint of the manufacturing sector increased electricity tariffs and consequential higher bills will mean that locally manufactured goods will now become less competitive.

GPL’s problems, of course, have to do with much more than high fuel prices. They have to do with, among other things, internal inefficiencies that render the company unable to collect its tariffs and from corrupt practices that allow some consumers to either pay less than they should or, otherwise, not to pay at all.

And despite the fact that the rate hike has been effected across the board it is the ordinary wage earner that must face the brunt of yet another rise in the cost of living in circumstances where developments like VAT and rising food prices have already hit consumers hard over the past year.

One accepts, of course, that Guyana is not an oil-producing country and that fuel price hikes will have a knock-on effect on electricity tariffs. It is, however, worth wondering whether the profitability of GPL is not linked in large measure to its own internal inefficiencies many of which, to be fair, have actually been inherited by the incumbent administration at the power company.

In his New Year Address to the nation President Bharrat Jagdeo stated emphatically that persons who proved themselves incapable of performing competently within public institutions ought not to anticipate that they will be allowed to remain in those positions. it may, perhaps, be premature to ask the President to apply his New Year promise at the GPL. The fact of the matter is, however, that however many the inherited problems and the more recent challenges associated with running the company, the absurd state in which it finds itself is attributable to far more than rising fuel prices.