A week ago Prime Minister Mark Phillips and Minister in the Ministry of Public Works Deodat Indar met with officials of the Guyana Power & Light Company (GPL) to discuss the four- decade-odd crisis of a broken down national electricity infrastructure and how, conceivably, it might be put together again. Such a meeting would have been expected to be of considerable public interest, given the newness of the administration and given that there may have been some measure of hope that newness would have meant, among other things, new ideas. Here, one should bear in mind that over the years a thick crust of national cynicism has solidified around the manner in which the issue of the country’s electricity woes has been handled across successive political administrations.
The meeting, we were told in a post-event Ministry of Public Works media release, was held to discuss “‘major plans to eliminate blackouts” that are “to come on stream soon.” Contextually, we surmised that the meeting would bring some different, enlightening dimension to the issue of remedying (or at least significantly improving) the electricity situation, which, without exception, heads the list of reasons for the protracted socio-economic underdevelopment of our country.
Mind you, the issue of our electricity woes has been the subject of tomes of sameness from succeeding political administrations…volumes of unashamed, high-sounding rhetoric that have long come to be seen by long-suffering Guyanese for what they have been, repeated excursions into unimaginative and vexing rhetoric which have long ceased to serve the palliative purpose for which they have been intended. These days, at the crest of the wave of cynicism on which the nation is riding, missives proffered as updates on the country’s power situation are usually, without exception, dismissed as volumes of words that talk a lot but say pityingly little. People, after all, can only take so much.
Last Tuesday’s media release did not either divert or disappoint nor did it even trouble itself to anchor its content to the stated mission articulated in its headline of outlining so-called “major plans to eliminate blackouts to come on stream soon.” Instead it descended into accounts of what some of the officials in attendance are purported to have said, all of the alleged utterings underscoring the decidedly misleading nature of the stated purpose of the engagement and perhaps dropping an unmistakable hint that when it comes to GPL and our power woes, we may be on yet another carousel to nowhere.
The framers and or editors of the release choose as its first substantive point the fact that the Minister in the Ministry of Public Works stated that the “goal” (of whatever it is that the GPL intends to do, going forward, is to “reduce blackouts countrywide, and to effectively address the structural and capacity issues affecting the company.” Well heavens to Betsy! How many zillion times have we not previously been told pretty much the identical thing! Is there some assumption here that in the midst of the repetitive (and costly) nature of the country’s power miseries that we are somehow likely to forget what “the goal” is? After all, hasn’t our long broken-down power supply infrastructure done by far the most sustained damage to our country and our economy?
And was it really necessary for us (again after four-odd decades of intolerable electricity woes) to be regaled by the GPL General Manager’s alleged outburst about the vision being “for the GPL to become a world-class utility to assist in transforming the country to a First World level.” Shouldn’t we, by now, be offered some inkling by these functionaries as to which generation of Guyanese will wake up to that ‘promised land’ of reliable electricity?
And would it not have been far more worthwhile for the GPL General Manager to furnish us with electricity-related information of a much more immediately pertinent nature rather than to regale us with futuristic pipe dreams about progress being made towards this “world class utility” of which the Ministry’s media release speaks? Surely it is the “significant infrastructural issues” which he says “remain to be resolved” rather than the elevation of our power supply system to “world class standards” that is the immediate priority here.
Finally, we find ourselves decidedly reluctant to take the media release’s word for it that the Prime Minister “was keen to note that the former APNU+AFC Administration neglected GPL and failed to invest into the power company although it is in urgent need of generators.” Why ever would the Prime Minister be “keen to note” the circumstances of our power supply system under ‘the former APNU+AFC administration” without the kind of contextualization that would obviously take account of preceding administrations on both sides of the political spectrum?
The sad fact of the matter is that the GPL, over many years has served as a kind of stalking horse by the opposing political sides in a boorish game of one-upmanship that really holds no ‘currency’ for either side, the public and the country as a whole having been, over time, far too seriously damaged by our electricity woes to be distracted by the attendant and altogether counterproductive political gamesmanship associated with ventilating the problem.
