There exists at this time an uncanny coincidence between Guyana’s parading of itself as an oil-producing ‘rising star’ on the one hand and on the other, seemingly hurtling towards a return to that ‘zombie’ regimen of power outages that had once traumatized generations of Guyanese. The preceding periods of protracted powerlessness had descended upon us against the backdrop of abject poverty and its attendant ills… not sufficient funds to import fuel and inexplicable technical glitches, remedies for which, we were told, had to be sought abroad. Those old enough to remember would recall the many grotesque artistic impressions of what, back then, was the GEC that had been placed in the public domain.
If there had never been a time when unexpected power outages had been a thing of the past, blackouts have returned like a vengeful Banshee to haunt us again. Darkness has thumbed its nose at our petro pretensions and returned like an avenging angel, throwing spanners in the works with monotonous regularity, challenging the political promises of oil-driven transformation and perhaps even beginning to raise questions as to whether or not, this time around, it may not be a matter of needing to bring in the ‘heavy hitters’ from abroad with the necessary know-how and simply ready ourselves to ‘shell out’ to keep the lights on.
The point is that whatever we do, going forward, we have already been parading ourselves as a transformed country to anyone who would listen. Indeed, it has now become a matter of us proving ourselves as being ready for the ‘big time.’ A reading of the ‘tea leaves’ suggest that we ain’t ready yet. Power generation, our age-old nemesis, has come back to haunt us. GPL, it appears, has, this time around, opted to play its cards close to its chest. Truth be told, if it had ever thought that an image of the power company’s ‘higher ups’ attended by Prime Minister Mark Phillips published in the print media might ‘cut it’, it failed miserably. People (on the basis of the public comments that have come to this newspaper’s attention) ‘ain’t runnin’ wid dat’. Sections of the populace are unmistakably beginning to see red over this distressing déjà vu.
A stage has been reached, one might think, when the political directorate must ‘come clean.’ If such a measure is unlikely to bring an immediate end to the outages, a public statement to the nation delivered by President Ali himself and addressing directly, issues like quite what the problem is, what it will take to remedy it, whether or not we have on board the people who can provide the remedy or whether we have imported experts or intend to import them to fix the problem amounts to a more generous measure of public enlightenment.
Here, as well, the point should be made that the idea of a country that manifestly cannot be relied upon to provide electricity sufficiently adequate to meet its basic needs is less than likely to be seen as an investment haven, oil or no oil. Where there appears to be – at least at the level of the messages disseminated – no seeming sense of urgency with regard to explaining just what it is that we face and what concrete steps are being taken to rectify the problem the political administration will have to contend with an external audience that continues to scratch its head in bewilderment and a domestic one that might well become cynical as to whether (as we say in Guyana) the ‘noise’ in the market is really indicative of a worthwhile ‘sale.’
