Guyana is by no means the only country in the world where the utility entities and public facilities are targeted by thieves seeking to strip those installations of metal infrastructure in order to cash in on a lucrative global scrap metal industry.
This newspaper’s research suggests that in Africa, particularly South Africa and Kenya, the practice extends to dismantling traffic signs and metal rails on important bridges. In Britain there have been cases in which sections of the rail transport service have been brought to a halt on account of the vandalizing of signal communication infrastructure.
Here in the Caribbean both the public and private sectors have been affected by metal theft and the view that the practice thrives on collusion between the thieves and the scrap metal industry has led to that industry being targeted for official sanctions.
It is much the same here in Guyana where the utility companies have been targeted for theft and the scrap metal trade has had to endure official sanctions. How much those sanctions have helped is unclear since the problem of theft and vandalism continues.
In GT&T’s case, quite apart from the cutting and removal of the copper cable there is the collateral damage that is done to the installation and the costs associated with repairs. When account is taken of the frequency with which these acts of vandalism occur, the claim by GT&T that fixing the damage costs millions of dollars is easily believable. It is of course altogether unnecessary to make the point regarding the losses that accrue to subscribers, especially those in the commercial sector when telephone services are disrupted.
There is little that GT&T – or the government for that matter – has been able to do to bring the problem to an end. On the company’s part it is altogether infeasible to police its entire buildout of cable installation while the police simply do not have the capacity to provide such a service.
Following the recent spate of raids against installations in Sophia, GT&T – which now appears to be in a state of despondency over the situation – has decided to go directly to the community in seeking, hopefully, to have the problem addressed. Last week, it undertook a ‘walkabout’ in Sophia in an exercise designed to appeal to what is best described as community social responsibility. It appears that GT&T’s move is driven by the notion that individuals in the community may well have information on the problem which may prove helpful in apprehending the thieves. The other assumption which GT&T is making is that those telephone subscribers whose services are affected by the vandalism would wish to have the problem solved and that that arguably might provide an incentive for them to contribute to the resolution of the problem. That too is not an unlikely scenario.
It makes every sense for communities to cooperate with the company in an effort to help address the problem since, apart from its importance in the realms of both domestic and commercial use, the telephone has become an integral part of the information technology infrastructure which of course means that communication access becomes impaired when the telephone service is removed. That, of course, has a number of implications.
GT&T’s move to secure the cooperation of the residents of Sophia in a bid to address the problem is an interesting one, the outcome of which raises the possibility that the idea of community social responsibility can be applied to the problem in other communities and even to other types of problems where community response is important. Testing the spirit of community responsibility in Guyana is certainly not the worst way of GT&T seeking to address the problem that it faces.
