We will not give up our co-op without a fight

Apr 17, 2012 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
It is perhaps no surprise that the Government of the day has employed what is now its normal modus operandi of an extremely crass and uncouth manner of informing the shareholders of the Linden Utility Services Cooperative Society Limited that they intend to snatch the product of 50 years of cooperative effort from the people.
The Prime Minister’s letter to the Editor in the Stabroek News of Sunday April 15th was the means chosen by the government to inform that by July 1st of this year, they intend to “Merge the supply area of Linden Utility Services Co-op Society Ltd. (LUSCSL) into Linden Electricity Company Inc (LECI)”.
While countries the world over encourage and promote cooperative efforts such as this, and the LUSCSL provides a beacon of an example for emulation for other similar efforts by Guyanese in all sectors, this government intends to simply tell our thousands of members to shut up shop and hand over our operations.
However, the four thousand-plus members of this proud cooperative effort, built in the mould of our forefathers who pooled their resources to purchase the villages of Buxton and Victoria have a simple message to deliver to the Prime Minister and the Government, we will NOT back down from this challenge. We will resist any attempt to emasculate or wrest from our control what is acknowledged as the largest cooperative effort in terms of membership in Guyana, and certainly one of the longest existing of these efforts.
The attempt by the government to nationalize the toil of our members simply cannot be countenanced. We have protested long and hard against the perceived discrimination of the government against the LUSCSL’s cooperative efforts, most recently writing to engage the opposition parties in discussions, since our attempts to secure an Electricity Distribution Licence, which we applied for on at least three occasions, as far back as 1996 and again in 2008, have met with no success.
The absence of this licence was cited by the government in an attempt in 2009 to impose a 16% increase in electricity costs on the residents of Wismar under the guise of charging VAT, a decision which met with stern protest by our members and was subsequently withdrawn.
This latest attempt is even more despicable; both for the manner of its conveyance as well as for its intent, and the members of the LUSCSL and the people of Linden will not relinquish this important entity without struggle and determined resistance. We call for no less than a complete retraction of this attempt to nationalize the LUSCSL, and for the immediate grant of an Electricity Distribution Licence to our Co-op so that we can proceed unimpeded into another half century of proudly serving the people of Linden.
COMMITTEE OF MANAGEMENT,
LUSCSL

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We will not give up our co-op without a fight

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