Berbice Bridge Toll hike proposal is ridiculous

Oct 21, 2018 AFC Column, Features / Columnists

Despite what was said last week at the PPP’s press conference, the average Guyanese and foreigner believes that the latest BBCI proposal to hike Berbice River Bridge tolls lives right down there with the ridiculous. These new rates do not meet any standard of reasonableness. Just the nonsensical nature of the highly improbable rates has put our very active conspiracy theorists to work.
Some are certain that the BBCI’s proposal to impose the ridiculous rates on November 12, the date of Local Government Elections, is an ill-disguised strategy to prevent some people who have to travel over the Berbice River from casting their votes. The theorists suggest that the Parliamentary Opposition is still smarting from the 2015 whipping, and so would stop at nothing to prevent anyone (except the most determined voters) from turning out.
Another conspiracy theorist posits that the bridge company was not losing any money, even though the Government had negotiated reduced tolls in 2015. Commuters have been paying lower fares since then, but the government was paying back the balance to the company out of the national coffers. But that was not enough for them. The BBCI kept on upping the ante, attempting to impose a further 55% increase in tolls after the 2015 negotiations, but the Government again said, ‘No Dice’.
The company is fully aware that this Coalition Government will put a halt to any hike in fares as far as it can, so the only conclusion one can come to is that there are ‘forces’ who want to use the Government as a “compensatory mechanism”, and according to Finance Minister Winston Jordan, to keep a faulty investment model, i.e. the Berbice Bridge, viable. In other words, the former PPP government had made yet another corrupt, ill-conceived deal in their rush to leave some positive legacy after mismanaging the economy for two decades.
Every step they take turns into a misstep, every project they undertook was ill-conceived, badly executed, and became burdensome on the people those projects are supposed to help, like the white elephant Skeldon Sugar Factory and the Enmore processing plant.
The thing is, everyone was happy that finally a bridge over the Berbice Bridge was going to become a reality. The government at the time had the support of most of the nation, especially the people living and working on both sides of the river. But as usual, they stomped all over that support, and threw it away by bullying both public sector and private sector companies and agencies (e.g. NIS and NBS) into investing their subscribers and customers’ money in this bridge.
Then the PPP Government cooked up a presumptuous arrangement that allowed for two companies with investments amounting to less than $400 million (or less than five percent of the full investment) to exercise controlling interest in BBCI. This is known as “disproportionately small investments”.
We met another conspiracy theorist last week who believes that the Berbice Bridge should ideally be owned and controlled by the Government and people of Guyana, and that the BBCI’s recent call on the Government to “buy us out” sounds suspiciously like a taunt. He thinks that the very ridiculousness of the recent fare hike to go into effect on the day of the Local Government Elections is the BBCI’s way of saying to Government, “We want money and if we can’t get it from the commuters, we might as well get it from you when you are most vulnerable”.
Never mind that Minister Patterson had sweetened the pot for BBCI by making a commitment to fund all the bridge’s maintenance, in addition to the Government paying a subsidy to BBCI to compensate for ‘lost revenue’ caused by the reduced tolls which were negotiated in 2015.

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