Poverty can lead to disaster

Jul 05, 2011 Editorial

People woke up Thursday morning to read about a two-year-old who was electrocuted because he reached for some sweets in the yard where he lived. He had come into contact with a live electrical wire that was connected to a main power source and used to provide illegal power to residents there. In short, someone was stealing electricity.
This is not a unique situation. There are similar illegal connections in just about every part of the country where power lines run. Not so long ago, Prime Minister Sam Hinds, who holds responsibility for the energy sector, said that one in four Guyanese is an electricity thief. And they straddle the economic divide.
This is indeed alarming, especially when one considers that those who acquire electricity by legal means must pay for the stolen current. We are aiding in the theft of electricity.
The vast majority of people who steal electricity would feel that they are ahead of the game; that they are not spending money. However, there is a cost attached to whatever they are doing. Some people stealing electricity have lost household appliances to power surges. Some have lost their homes and more than a few have lost their lives.
Of course there are the wealthy who have no reason to steal electricity except that they are loathe to part with any money and like most rich people, do everything in their power to avoid spending money even if it means contributing to the state that they expect to provide services for them. Many of them even go to court to challenge the very act that would lead to their exposure as thieves.
In this most recent instance, the loss is more than some can bear; it is the loss of a child who did not get a chance to live.
Indeed, the community in which this horrific incident occurred is depressed. The people are poverty-stricken. The infrastructure is almost non-existent and the authorities rarely pay any attention to the residents there. The police pay regular visits there because the residents are often the prime suspects in criminal acts.
The harsh reality is that there is never a serious effort to have depressed communities move away from their state and there may be a reason for this. It may be that these people are comfortable waking up with others similarly poor. This human nature; people are always comfortable with kith and kin. And while the government may not recognize this, it surely knows that the way to rid the society of the depressed communities is to simply remove the people.
We saw this happen when the government needed to clear the Railway Embankment in the heart of the city. It happened when the people in Tiger Bay needed to be moved so that the rightful owners of the property could repossess their assets.
The government initially built a holding shelter in La Penitence and that became another depressed neighbourhood because many of the people simply refused to move on.
It is from these depressed communities that the people who make life a misery come. They are accustomed to seeing discomfort that they do not even give it a thought when they attack the wider society. The thought of discomfort does not cross their mind. At the same time they would do anything to enjoy a spark of comfort.
That is why they steal and hire themselves out as anything from labourers to gunmen. We are certain that the men who gunned down the seventy-two-year-old woman came from a depressed community. That is why they have disappeared without a trace.
Is it possible to improve these depressed communities? We think so. This has been done in South Sophia where the government spent money to improve the infrastructure. To the extent to which the infrastructure were improved to that extent did the people set about improving their lives.
Indeed, old habits die hard but less people steal electricity; more of them seek mortgages to improve their homes and outsiders with acceptable morals enter those once depressed communities and effect a transformation from within.
For example, West Indians who move to the United States and take up residence in once depressed communities have effected a change for the better in those communities.
And so we ask the government to divert some of the money it spends in areas that people do not readily appreciate to pay attention to the depressed communities. By doing so, there would be no more deaths of children whose parents want a better life and try to attain it by illegal means.

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