Blackout, whiteout, and get-out

Oct 30, 2016 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols
Lawlessness and lack of effective leadership! Because of them, many live in fear, ignorance, and poverty.

A few wallow in unbelievable and hedonistic wealth. Sounds like Guyana, but it’s almost everywhere in our increasingly global village of haves, have-nots, and never-will-haves. But I live here, in this blessed, wretched country where those two terrors continue to mock our ‘progress’, and lately I’ve been thinking of two ‘outs’ that may well shape the remaining days of my life. They are blackout, (assisted by whiteout) and get-out! The last one may be a final resort if the other two persist.
Blackout and whiteout are related. Where information and knowledge are concerned, they both prevent clear-sightedness and awareness of what is happening around you. Understanding and vision are lost or clouded; there are no horizons or reference points, so you easily become disoriented. You don’t know if you’re going or coming, or if what you ‘see’, hear, and read is true, or even real. Paradoxically, you can experience them on the clearest and brightest of days, or nights. They may cause you to question everything, including your sanity. My sanity! It wasn’t always that way, because I was once a child.
In the 1960s, a blackout at our house on Princes Street (and somehow I remember only the nighttime ones) was often a fun occasion, at least for me – an anticipation of the unexpected; of thrill and apprehension. It was either a chance to romanticize our home by lighting candles and telling or retelling jumbie stories; or the startling arrival of my father’s eccentric friend who got a kick out of removing our main fuse before entering and entertaining us with licorice sticks, ‘Nancy’ stories, and a couple of white mice he carried around in his pockets, one of which was waggishly named Maimonides. And a whiteout was the discombobulating fog you only read about, experienced by someone driving in a blizzard somewhere up north.
It’s different now. A blackout is a demon of disruption and darkness that frustrates the most genial of souls and, usually at night, attracts the very real possibility of burglary, assault, and death. It has become ubiquitous. Its effect on the psyche of the nation isn’t difficult to fathom; it can be assumed that Guyanese in general have had it with G.P.L. (And before that, G.E.C.) with their grand promises and grinding interruptions, and with the government of the day, going back at least 50 years. Its effect on the day-to-day operations of the public sector, private enterprise, and the country’s economy at large, is palpably evident.
By the way, in this dazzling electronic electric age, is it that difficult to provide a generally uninterrupted electricity supply to a narrow, albeit long, coastal strip of land populated by a little more than half a million people? (For time’s sake, let’s not look at the electrification of interior locations) This is a layman’s question, and deserves a straightforward answer; hopefully there are still some of those left. But now this is where another aspect of blackout, aided by whiteout, comes in.
We ordinary humans, among whom I suppose, are many Guyanese, like to think we know more than we actually do. We talk and argue about politics, social justice, and economics as if we are at least armchair or street-smart experts. What I’ve learnt from life, and from my relatively brief media experience, is that we usually aren’t. What we think we know is influenced by what others say; by what they allow, or hide from us, and by uninformed conclusions, conventional wisdom, and personal bias. In these ways the people who really know what’s going on, usually a small clique, perpetrate information/knowledge blackouts and whiteouts that basically cause confusion among the naïve and gullible masses. How do you think conspiracy theories originate?
Tens of thousands of Guyanese live on the edge of survival, below which an abyss of confusion, fear, and rank poverty lurks. It doesn’t take much to tip them over, and in fact many have fallen in. Disillusion is becoming endemic. Bewilderment and frustration oscillate with anger, especially when trying to understand why our country seems to be in such a mess, and for so long. They want answers but get only muddles; for example, why, with all the alleged corruption in the previous government, haven’t certain entities and individuals been brought to justice?
Here are some more questions I would like answered in as plain, jargon-less English as possible. Are there secret deals among our politicians, big business people, and foreign entities that are supposedly linked to Guyana’s well-being, and if so, what are the rank and file citizens getting from them? What exactly is NICIL, and how does it operate to the benefit of said ordinary Guyanese? To what extent have government ministers justified those large salary increases? And why can’t public service teachers, nurses, and police officers at least get an increase of similar proportion? How are the forensic audits and COIs helping me, you, and the government? What really happened with Pradoville, Baishanlin, Barama, and the Sanata purchase? And there are more.
Adding salt to these burning wounds and vexing the minds of our head-scratching have-nots, is the way huge sums of money are spoken of and tossed around in this country. Millions and billions of dollars exchange hands, are won or lost, or seemingly float around waiting for the grabbing hand or the accommodating account, hardly ever in the name of a have-not. Maybe like the US$5,000,000 allegedly owed the government by a Chinese telecom company; that’s one billion (G$1,000,000,000) possibly floating somewhere between Hong Kong and Georgetown, or already landed. (I have large, empty pockets, and great ideas for putting a billion bucks to good use)
But back to blackout – I’ve been on the Essequibo Coast for the past week, having left a rain of blackouts in GT, only to be greeted with a torrent here. Over the past 24 hours (On Friday, 28th) there have been more than 12 hours of outages interspersed with three short, very short, periods of electricity. My laptop, the internet, and this story, were at its mercy. I’m learning that I have much more patience than I thought.
A high government official recently shared his concern about the reason/s for the spate of blackouts currently hitting the coastline, and at least one interior location. I read about damaged cables and lines, but the official seemed to be hinting sabotage. A correspondingly high opposition official went along with the cable damage scenario, but spoke about ‘other incidents being kept quiet’. So, to add another question to my list, ‘Can the GPL throw some additional and much needed light on the current (intentional puns) situation?
I, along with a multitude of perplexed Guyanese, am tired of groping in the dark where questions of governance, justice, law, and the ‘simple’ day-to-day running of our country are concerned. The common man and woman should not have to bother too much about these things. We should have a genuine but basic understanding of them; beyond that we have a government; we have representatives in parliament. And we vote, but not for blackouts.
Still, for the time being, I am not contemplating the ‘get-out’ option.

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