An open letter to Captain Gerry Gouveia: Does the Captain have a mind of his own?

Aug 16, 2013 Letters

Dear Editor,
I commend Gerry Gouveia for asking in an open letter to the press four prominent critics of the Amaila Falls hydro project, Christopher Ram, Ramon Gaskin, Anand Goolsaran and Dr. Clive Thomas, some critical questions. However, from reading the letter, it is abundantly clear that Gerry Gouveia engages in a grave form of intellectual hypocrisy and heinousness. He highlights and ventilates the opinions and positions of the PPP government and the four individuals but he offers no opinion, view, position, conclusion, research or findings of his own. Gouveia does not contextualize the commentary allegedly made by the four men. Nor does he admit that the public still labours under a cloud of withheld and denied full disclosure and information on this project, something the PPP still persist in doing even in the face of the collapse of this project.
The questions Gerry Gouveia posed are critical and pivotal to the debate on Amaila but they are not the only burning issues on this fiasco. Gouveia selectively and conveniently cherry-picks his four questions while opportunely forgetting to ask other key questions such as on the outlandish financing terms and arrangements agreed to by the PPP government, the suitability of the site itself, future national electricity demand projections, etc. Gouveia’s second question is not really a question. It is a speculative, logically specious and intellectually corrupt attempt to get the four gentlemen to agree to a false premise and conclusion Gouveia himself makes and frames in the form of a question. Unless Gouveia could point the public to a legislated removal of the government’s capability to provide subsidies to GPL as a result of this project, it is absurd to assume GPL will not be subsidised after Amaila Falls came on stream. In fact, the taxpaying public is heavily sudsidizing the entire Amaila Falls project as constituted and in doing so is subsidizing GPL, which is bound by law to take all of its power from Amaila. There is no persuasive evidence that Amaila Falls will lead to reduced GPL fossil fuel dependency based on, among other factors, future national electricity demand and the plan to force massive self-generating entities onto the grid.
Instead of demanding answers from others, maybe Gouveia could in light of recent exchange rate fluctuations that devalued the Guyana dollar, provide us with his numbers of how much the project cost escalated in the past month. Christopher Ram, Ramon Gaskin, Anand Goolsaran and Dr. Clive Thomas did not kill hydro electricity’s best chance in fifty years in Guyana because there is no conclusive evidence that Amaila Falls to begin with was Guyana’s best chance for hydro electricity, and certainly not Amaila as currently packaged. This project killed itself. It was suicidal voodoo economics, catastrophic decision-making, hasty legacy-making egomania and idiocy from Jagdeo and his PPP minions, the arrogant inability to admit failure, an eternal willingness to hold this nation’s head under water for cabalistic self-enrichment and a corrupt, information withholding PPP regime without majoritarian political capital that helped to kill this project. In his letter, Gerry Gouveia has demonstrated the infamous arrogance and brazen manipulation of information that sabotaged this project. Until Gerry Gouveia offers his own opinion and stops parroting the contentions of the PPP government, he is not entitled to any response from these citizens who have done this country a magnificent favour by lending their intellectual prowess to examining the Amaila Falls hydro project.
M. Maxwell

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