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GPL blackouts claim a plan to justify ‘money for the boys’

May 01, 2021 News

…as AFC calls for investigations into hiring of foreign contractors

Kaieteur News – The spate of recent blackouts by the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) Corporation taken together with claims by senior members of the ruling administration—including Vice President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo—of no investment in the utility company’s transmission and distribution network in recent years, is just another ploy to justify hiring foreign contractors in another scheme being labelled ‘money for the boys.’
This was the position adumbrated by Alliance For Change (AFC) General Secretary, David Patterson, who responded yesterday to the claims that the coalition administration while in office neglected the GPL grid to the point that has led to the recent spate of blackouts.
Patterson was adamant, “it is suspected that the background to these untruthful claims, is to justify GPL entering into costly contracts with overseas contractors with no evidence of public procurement procedures being followed thus bypassing their in house units and local contractors who are fully capable of executing these maintenance programmes.”
According to Patterson, it represents “another example of money for the boys” and the party has since called for a full investigation into the new procurement practices of GPL.
The AFC executive said his party will be holding “Board members liable for any and all un-investigated and unchallenged diversions from applicable policies and procedures of procurement.”
Qualifying his position with regards to investments at GPL during the coalition’s term in Office, Patterson observed “this is a complete falsehood and is a disservice to the members of the company’s Transmission and Distribution unit (T&D), one of the hardest working teams in the company.”
According to Patterson, “this unit has been working under the harshest conditions within some of the most challenging terrain and have been providing yeoman service which enabled the company to reduce their line losses by five percent over the last five years.”
He suggested, “their works resulted in saving GPL over $400M annually” and as such, “the AFC calls on GPL to correct this injustice to the hardworking employees of the company.”
He noted that for the records, “the T&D team, over the last five years has been conducting maintenance exercises on almost all the major transmission lines in the Demerara Berbice Interconnected System (DBIS), coupled with regular maintenance to our distribution network.”
According to Patterson, due to the efforts of the T&D teams, “GPL was able to progressively reduce the frequency and duration of blackouts between 2015 and early 2020.”

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