Power and power
Kaieteur News – It is unlikely that the slogan for Guyana Power and Light’s (GPL) website, “Empowering You”, would have been chosen and settled on with as much a sense of painful irony as positive idealism. From the original English ventures by pioneers Roger Hammond and Thomas Edison in the 1880s, nearly a century and a half ago, the public supply of electricity has been indispensable to the development of nations and the empowerment of their people. Not so in Guyana where, since independence, the consistently unreliable and expensive public provision of electricity has certainly not been empowering our people, even as successive political administrations have used the poor provision of power to prevail and then tried to excuse their failure to refuse. to repair the power position while in power.
For example, when the David Granger administration was elected to government in 2015, this was largely due to a campaign that promised “It’s time to end blackouts”. By then, 15 years into the new millennium, GPL’s increasingly ridiculous excuses for power cuts had become so widespread that they spawned dozens of internet memes, and one whole Facebook page, the GPL Rat, after the excuse and It was once conceded that a giant blackout was allegedly caused by a rat chewing through some wire in the Kingston generation factory.
In August 2016, over a year into the administration that promised an end to blackouts, there was no end, with the Department of Public Information (DPI) stating: “The [David Patterson, Public Infrastructure] The Minister explained that he had recently met with the Guyana Power and Light Board (GPL) to improve the response time to at least 15 minutes. However, efforts are underway to repair the cable, but the operation is specialized so the quotes are out and work would start soon, Minister Patterson explained. In Demerara, it is not a generators question, as all generators work, but it is a question of the distribution system, Minister Patterson reiterated. The elderly system is ineffective and often leads to blackouts in the East Coast, West Bank and East Coast Demerara areas. ”
Two years later, and three into the Coalition government, in May 2018, Patterson was still firmly pledging that “reliable and stable electricity will be supplied”, a month later the Minister of State, Joseph Harmon, has given a similar assurance. The Granger administration is now history and with the new PPP administration in place, the abstinence is very familiar. In October last year, we had the new Prime Minister, Mark Phillips make promises that had been heard and nausea for the previous five years. According to one DPI report: “Prime Minister Brigadier (ret’d) Mark Phillips has outlined some of the Government’s plans to diversify the energy sector to end the scourge of blackouts that have plagued the nation for years . In a recent interview, the First Minister said that the Government had sought to address the challenges facing Guyana Power and Light Incorporated (GPL) from its first days in office, in a bid to end on flacowts. ”
People in power must get serious about providing power to the Guyanese people, and start by recognizing the devastating effects of power cuts on the local economy at every level possible. Not only is money / value lost from constant blackouts but money / value is prevented from being earned. Think of a pastry maker with a piece of cheese in the fridge. She has invested in that cheese to add value to that cheese for her to make a profit. If there is a blackout, that cheese goes bad and not only loses the money it has invested in the cheese, it also loses any potential profit it can make from giving ‘ put the cheese in a cheese roll and sell it. And at the end of the day, GPL doesn’t give her a blackout rebate on her bill – she has to pay the full price for the disturbed electricity supply that has completely destroyed her bottom line. Now scale that up to industrial levels and you get a sense of the huge disruption that an unstable power supply has caused in the development and growth of this country, from the small producer to the medium-sized enterprise to the big manufacturer ( to Guyana at least) which is required to compete in a global economy.
Politicians from both sides of our great political divide continue to fail in providing a reliable power supply, even as they continue to thrive through power by the people, both figuratively and literally because most people are not in office actively do that. taxpayers not only pay their electricity bills but also enjoy alternate sources of electricity, from solar to gas generators, when most of the country has to suffer blackouts. It is time for the people to be truly empowered by, well, more power to the people.