It appears not to have occurred to any of the sides in what has degenerated into an outrageously acrimonious debate over the proposed Amaila Falls Hydroelectric Project that there exists a close and critical relationship between the quality of life of ordinary Guyanese and the realization of a cheap and reliable source of energy. Hence – in our view – the importance of placing the discourse on the Amaila Falls project in the public domain in a manner that is clear, simple and concise, since, if ever there was a national issue in which ordinary Guyanese need to be involved it is the issue of the creation of a hydropower facility.
There are a few other Amaila-related considerations that are deserving of public comment. The first has to do with the very limited local knowledge of either the technical aspects or the economics of hydro – and that goes for the political commentators and social activists. So the discourse has really been limited to a handful of people who have focused mainly on a disdainful parading of knowledge in a manner that bespeaks considerable contempt for those of us who are struggling to keep up. The upshot of this, of course, is that the vast majority of stakeholders in hydropower have been hopelessly locked out of the debate. The media too, has not helped much. It has had to rely largely on information fed to it by people who know or people who say they know. The truth is that even for experienced working journalists who may well have been following issues relating to hydropower long before Amaila came along, cutting through the thicket of highly complex and highly specialized information on Amaila has proved difficult.
Substantively, it was the government’s responsibility to explain Amaila in all of its various dimensions to the populace. That would have taken a combination of experts – or at the very least considerably knowledgeable persons – in a range of disciplines – including public information specialists capable of engaging the technicians then converting what they had to say into easily communicable language.
Since that has not happened and the politicians have decided, belatedly, to take on this assignment pretty much on their own the net effect has been that the whole discourse has ensued pretty much over the heads of the populace. Meanwhile, and in the course of a discourse that has sunk unashamedly into cheap political gamesmanship, many of the squabbles have drifted entirely outside of anything remotely related to Amaila. We can deny it however much we wish but the truth is that if Amaila goes down the real culprit will be our cheap and destructive political culture which we are clearly unable to alter, not even for the sake of Amaila.
Oddly enough, Amaila offered an opportunity for the political opposition to seize an element of high ground in the matter of the Amaila Falls project. It missed the bus, failing to recognize the importance of simply disengaging from the political cat-sparring with the government over the project – which, frankly, amounted to an exercise of unhelpful political gamesmanship – and turning its attention to putting its case – its reasons for not supporting Amaila, that is, to the populace as a whole. Here, its problem was that its key spokespersons on Amaila were economists and technicians of one sort or another all of whom have dominated the media space with points of view which, however valid or otherwise they have, have probably been found wanting in the extent of their contribution to enhancing public enlightenment. Here, it is not a question of underestimating the public’s understanding of important national issues, but simply calling a spade a spade. Insofar as the discourse on Amaila has caught public attention, that appears to have occurred mostly in what one might call ‘a political sense,’ where, in the finest tradition of our political culture of blind adherence, people simply take sides without really knowing why. Those of course should be seen as separate and distinct from those social commentators whom, in some instances, are really no more well-informed, but who, over time, have cultivated the incurable habit of needing to be in the public eye.
Resolving the Amaila issue – one way or another – has to so with setting aside those formidable political hurdles and settling down to the business of resolving – or not resolving as the case may be – the various concerns and anomalies that attend the project. Here, it is not a question of whether, eventually, we embrace Amaila or otherwise. The more important issue has to do with, first, significantly enhancing public understanding of the process that leads to a verdict on Amaila so that ordinary Guyanese can be afforded the opportunity of making their own decisions on the project.
