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GPL proposed rate hike attracts protest
Armed with placards, some people yesterday mounted a protest outside the Prime Minister’s office in Kingston, Georgetown to register their disapproval with the Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL) proposed 26.7 percent increase in electricity rates.
Political Activist, Mark Benschop, told Kaieteur News that it is unfair for the government to wake up one morning and decide to “come to the nation and say they are increasing electricity rates not by four to five percent but by 26.7 percent.”
Benschop described the move by GPL to increase the electricity tariff as “heartless. How can the country be how it is today in terms of people hardly getting jobs, cost of living is high, unemployment is high
Protesters
and GPL is increasing its electricity rates?”
With placards bearing “No GPL increase”; “More increase, More poverty”; “Not a cent more for fat cats or GPL,” the protesters promised to visit other parts of the country to inform the people of Guyana what the government is doing.
“This is unfair, they want us to pay $5 for one cent services. We will not pay a penny more to GPL. Let them stop paying the ones in high positions so much money,” the protesters shouted yesterday. “Is this how they are treating the working class? What are the single mothers going to do? What will the pensioners do? God be with us. I just hope that the government would find it decent enough to hold the proposed tariff increase until GPL can get its house in order,” Benschop noted.
One protester described the proposed increase in electricity as a “slap in the face.” He told this publication that “Guyanese should not pay anything else until GPL show us their books. Let them pay the millions of dollars they owe in taxes.”
According to Alliance for Change Leader, Khemraj Ramjattan, “They (GPL) are asking us to prepay their light bills why doesn’t the government prepay them with the 26.7 percent so they will get money to do whatever they have to do?”
The protest will continue today…
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