Blackouts – a leadership industry

May 02, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Whenever there is a sweet spot that is found, it is a usual human tendency to zero in on it, seize it, and suck it for every drop of what it is worth. While this is being drained dry, the minds of the greedy busily calculate how to extend the sweetness. This is what has happened under the PPP/C Government with electricity in Guyana, as its leaders have executed through the Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL).
More than one PPP/C Governments have made electricity the crooked cover under which there is pretense of doing something better for Guyanese plagued by blackouts for decades. It is a never-ending haemorrhaging of money by the millions and billions annually.
Guyanese live with a chronic sickness, which has a most familiar name – blackouts. Blackouts are so regular, so common, so ever-present that they are now an inseparable part of almost every Guyanese family. This is so particularly for those citizens who cannot afford the huge cash outlay for a generator, or the greater expense of solar power. So, most Guyanese live with the fear, dread, and agony of blackouts. It is beyond denial that blackouts, the constant and devastating repetitions, are bad for families and communities. But what is bad for the great majority of Guyanese, who have to live with them, is incredibly good for one PPP/C Government after another and its insiders. Those squeezing enormous benefits from blackouts and off the backs of struggling, suffering, sickened Guyanese are high political leaders and their handpicked cronies who have some relationship to the generation of electricity in this country.
To repeat: the blackouts that are harrowing for poor Guyanese are prospering beyond belief for PPP/C Government leaders and their kith and kin. In numerous national budgets many millions are set aside for the GPL so that a reliable source of electricity through refurbishing key areas of the company, recruiting knowledgeable people, obtaining better systems can be had. The costly projects have been countless and come like clockwork, year after year. This is so that electricity can be transmitted to Guyanese, for them to go about the tasks of regular life involving their homes, their children, their work, their leisure, their worship, their care when they are sick. There is a huge problem: Guyanese are not getting the electricity promised.
The problem is that after all the many millions have been spent, the people who are supposed to benefit from a better supply of energy, and get something dependable from the millions supposedly put to work, they are either in the same place, or worse off than before. It is clear that something is terribly wrong with this national issue of electricity and blackouts; what has long been a full-blown national crisis first gets worse, then even worse. What is becoming clearer still is that the leaders who spend millions are deceiving and cheating citizens who look to them for electricity answers, energy solutions.
We at this publication make this clear: Guyanese are being taken for a ride. This is because a quality electricity supply is a leadership lie. The GPL functions as the machinery, one of many, but one of the bigger ones, through which the leaders of this country steal and rob the people blind. This is through old and new (proposed ones, too) multimillion dollar projects that always seem to fall short, new systems put in place that collapse, old technology replaced that don’t hold up. Guyanese need to get something in their heads: electricity and the GPL (to it, from it, and through it) function as the channel through which crafty leaders in the PPP/C Government carry out their robberies of the national treasury.
Improving the blackout situation is something that can be done, as was shown by the Coalition Government during its five years in office. The questions are how it is and why is it that the PPP/C Government can’t get it right, is unable to deliver the same standard, and significantly ease the electricity woes of hundreds of thousands of Guyanese. There is a description that sheds light on what goes on here with chronic blackouts. It is the Great Electricity Robbery of Guyana by the PPP/C.

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