Dear Editor,
For years, the residents of New Amsterdam/East Canje, Berbice have suffered myriad blackouts, scheduled and unscheduled at the hands of GPL with no seeming end in sight. Over the past three weeks, the situation has once again deteriorated to a sickening level with rotating five-hour periods of blackouts being experienced every day. This past weekend was the worst.
The blackouts simply took over and darkness and stillness engulfed the town and its environs. On Sunday alone, the residents endured some 19 hours of blackout, from some time after midnight Saturday to 8:30 pm on Sunday.
To add insult to injury, the management of GPL has not seen it fit to utter one word of explanation or apology to its suffering consumers or any time frame for a resolution. No load-shedding schedule was published and the consuming public has just been left in the dark, literally. Of course other essential services such as water supply have been affected. Shame on GPL that it required a third-party explanation from the Ministry of Housing and Water whose services depend on GPL and which were also effected, to bring some kind of official acknowledgement in the press about this current state of affairs.
The residents of New Amsterdam/East Canje are totally fed up with the service (lack of) from GPL. Just think about the inconvenience and distress of the hard-working breadwinners who have to come home to the darkness and rise in the morning in darkness to prepare themselves and their children for work and school.
What are they supposed to do with no water to cook and bathe and clean? Where are we as a country going if we cannot in this day and age provide our long suffering citizens such a basic service as electricity, even at the astronomical cost that they are asked to pay for it? How can we expect a loyal, productive workforce?
What are our children to aspire to in terms of a life and a future in this country? I predict that the endless queues outside the US and Canadian embassies that we see every day will continue to grow while the government of this country in astonishing ignorance (feigned or real) continues to sing its own praises!
The residents of New Amsterdam demand that the government decentralize the electricity service since it is obvious that GPL is incapable of delivering its contractual obligations, and privatize it out to anyone who is capable of providing the service.
Enough is enough!
Yours faithfully,
Ivor Schultz
