GPL’s blackout binge triggering mounting consumer frustration
Stabroek Business Editor Arnon Adams examines some of the everyday fallout from GPL’s crippling power supply crisis
I was ‘bringing business’ and you would have thought that the small south Georgetown vulcanizing shop would have been pleased to see me. That was decidedly not the case. The shop’s three attendants were seated on low, greasy stools on the pavement, at the entrance to the small, cramped business place, their faces bearing expressions of tired resignation. When I told them that I was seeking a vulcanizing job the female attendant who bore the glummest expression of all shook her head slowly from side to side, not bothering to offer a verbal response. She appeared too depressed to muster the effort to speak.
“This is what this country is doing to small business!” The angry, disembodied voice issued from inside the dark cavern of the tiny vulcanizing shop. “GPL killin we, deh killin dis whole country!” The owner of the voice, a small, middle-aged man in greasy overalls, emerged from the darkness, a mixture of blinding rage and frustration etched on his face. It was as if he was simply waiting for someone, anyone, to come along so that he could give vent to his feelings. “No power since morning! Is how people gun live in dis place?” His anger was real and I felt threatened. He persisted with a tirade of expletive-laden protestations after which he lit a cigarette and ambled off along the pavement.
I ventured an enquiry about a generator and he rounded on me, his anger rejuvenated. “Who gun buy dis generator? You? He was at the top of his voice now, his fresh outburst targeting me, GPL and, as he put it, “dis whole damn country.” I felt threatened again and hastened to point out that I was not a GPL representative. That did nothing to deter him. My remark about a generator had further triggered his frustration and he was now in a zone. He was intermittently
taking deep drags on his cigarette and shouting obscenities about the national power company in my direction. I decided that it would be unwise to bandy words with him.
My tire had been leaking air slowly but it was not flat. I could have driven off but for some inexplicable reason I sat in my car and endured his ‘performance.’ Eventually, the fact that I did not appear in the least offended by his tantrum dawned on the man from the vulcanizing shop. His tone changed and he offered me a less animated lecture on his electricity problems. He was, he said, “a family man with a small business to run, staff to pay and children to feed.” The size of his operation did not allow him to acquire and run a generator. He had been experiencing intermittent and protracted blackouts for several weeks and his takings had been down considerably. He essayed an apology for his earlier outburst and I told him that it was all right.
I volunteered that GPL was seeking to effect the kind of overhaul of the electricity infrastructure
that would bring the blackouts to an end. “It will get worse but eventually it will get better,” I told him. I was echoing the views of GPL Board Chairman Winston Brassington but the man from the vulcanizing shop wasn’t buying that. “Get better, when?” He laughed loudly at my seeming confidence in this recent official pronouncement. “GPL is dis country obeah!”
Part of the problem that GPL faces is that the company has long become the target of an overwhelming and altogether justifiable consumer cynicism. Changes in management from public to private sector then back to public sector again, IDB financial assistance, Wartsila intervention – nothing seems to have worked. People on the whole are unrelentingly hostile to GPL; repeated promises to make blackouts go away have made them that way. “All deh doin is f-ing up dis country,” the man from the vulcanizing shop told me. He was somewhat more even-tempered now; still, there was no mistaking the venom in his tone.
`A month or so’
The day before my encounter with the man from the vulcanizing shop GPL Board Chairman Winston Brassington had been thrown into the company’s public relations affray. I weakly volunteered his “patience and tolerance” appeal and the man from the vulcanizing shop laughed again and asked me whether I thought that his family and his employees could be expected to exercise patience and tolerance and whether I had any idea as to how long the period of patience and tolerance could be expected to last. I suggested “a month or so” and he laughed again. “You sure you is not a GPL man?” He had ceased to take me seriously and I choose to bring that particular phase of our discourse to a close.
GPL’s Public Relations people face a monumental task. Public Relations is about image-management, assuming of course that there is an image to manage. Without wishing to be unkind to GPL I believe that over more than three decades of blackouts the company’s public image has been ground down, eroded. There are no more ‘spins’ left and there is a limit to which you can re-invent yourself. The irony is that the available evidence suggests that the current efforts to remedy the company’s woes are sincere and that some good is likely to come of them. That, however, is hardly the point. There have simply been too many broken promises. GPL’s real problem is that few people want to give the company a hearing anymore. There is simply no more reasoning with and appealing to consumers’ patience; and even after the current rehabilitation work is done it will take a protracted blackout-free period to restore a measure of confidence in the integrity of GPL.
Public relations
The company’s public relations people seem amiable enough. You do not get the impression, though, that they are ‘in the loop.’ Everything, it seems, has to go to the top. Why some entities hire PR people we will never know. The press releases are drafted and redrafted by the bureaucrats and the PR people appear to do little more than transmit them to the media. The problem is that not too many of our bureaucrats have any real grasp of the essence of PR. It really is all a question of controlling what information gets put into the public domain.
In the wake of the current severe spell of blackouts small businesses that rely on power to provide their various services have been suffering immensely. Checks with some downtown suppliers reveal that generator sales have gone up; but as the man from the vulcanizing shop pointed out generators mean additional overheads and profit margins do not allow for such investments. Some of the small urban city businesses, vulcanizing shops, electrical repair operations and the like are losing custom. Tiny, cramped downtown stores are trading under hot and inhospitable, conditions. Those small businesses that have generators run them in the knowledge that there will be a price to pay, a price that will make the difference between breaking even and making a profit – or even running at a loss.
The man from the vulcanizing shop wondered aloud as to whether there would be any consideration of compensation for loss of patronage. I risked another tantrum by suggesting to him that he was living in another world. By now, however, his rage had subsided entirely. He was, like so many other consumers, seeing the funnier side of the GPL saga.
Form her perch in front of the vulcanizing shop the female employee broke her silence and chimed in. She said that she was worried about not earning any money for the day and about the fact that she would have to “go home to a blackout.” She told me that she was “a woman with children” and that her night-time household chores had become unbearable in the blackouts. “Yuh tink de big ones who telling we to hold on putting up with dis. Dey gat deh generator.” I nodded in agreement even though she was making a statement of what she believed to be fact rather than requiring an opinion of me.
In their condition of extreme cynicism some owners of small businesses are inclined to the view that blackouts are another way of suppressing them. It is a line of reasoning that derives from not knowing ‘what else to think.’ “If de small man can’t earn he gun thief.” One of the two male employees had joined the discourse. He told me that he was the father of two children. He seemed too young for the responsibility but I took him at his word. He said that for the day so far the shop had done four small jobs before the power supply had been interrupted at around midday. It was approaching five in the afternoon and he was preparing for the end of another frustrating day. He said that today was the second such day “fuh dis week alone.”
I thought of offering Brassington’s recent undertaking about the new 69 kv line from Kingston to Sophia and the change 50 to 60 hertz in parts of Georgetown then changed my mind. Such an intervention may well have provoked another tirade from the ‘boss.’ More than that I was beginning to see my discourse with him and his staff as an enlightening perspective on the issue of the current spate of blackouts and their impact on small business; a sort of microcosm of a wider problem. My journalistic impulse came to the fore and I reasoned that it was to my advantage to try to keep the discourse amicable.
I understand only too clearly now that people like the man from the vulcanizing shop and his staff have no interest whatsoever in Mr. Brassington’s 69 kv lines and “50 to 60 hertz” explanations and quite why these kinds of accounts explanations are trotted out with such monotonous regularity is a mystery. Bureaucrats invariably make poor public relations practitioners. They trend to believe, it seems, that of complex, technical explanations that invariably evade the bottom line are enough to sate public frustration. What they never seem to ask themselves before they go public is exactly what it is that people want and need to know. However well-meaning Mr. Brassington’s interventions may have been, however altruistic his intentions, people like the man in the tyre shop and the woman with children who was going home to a blackout are not impressed or impacted upon in the least. The common assumption is that those pronouncements are really intended to confuse people, to fob them off.
The morning after my encounter with the man from the vulcanizing shop I telephoned the President of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) Chandradat Chintamani. I have found him to be one of the more amiable and forthcoming private sector officials on business issues but on this occasion he made no secret of his lack of enthusiasm for a conversation about the electricity.
“GPL is probably just about the worst issue you can discuss right now,” was Chintamani’s initial response to my question about our power woes. I asked him whether the Chamber had been receiving any feedback on the ways in which the power supply problem is affecting them. “Of course we have been receiving feedback. The problems have been affecting small business, in fact, all business, significantly. I am not sure that some businesses can take much more of this.”
Phased solution
I asked him about people like the man from the vulcanizing shop who had asked me where the money was to come from to buy a generator. “I agree. Where do businesses like that get the money from to invest in a generator?”
Some time ago Chintamani wrote to GPL to find out what the nature of the problem was and, more importantly, when it would come to an end. I gleaned from that part of GPL’s response that he shared with me that the power company is proffering a phased solution. In the short-term some things will be done by November 5. Other things will be done by December 15. On the whole I got the impression that GPL was saying to the Chamber that the situation will improve somewhat, incrementally, between now and December 15. Chintamani agreed with me, however, that GPL’s letter still wasn’t giving any clear indication as to when the blackouts will finally come to an end. He told be that he would raise the issue again when the Chamber meets with GPL next week.
The man from the vulcanizing shop had told me where he thought GPL could put its load-shedding schedule and Chintamani concurred in less colourful language. Apart from the fact that the schedules are often unreliable Chintamani told me that he believes that it might be a better idea to simply take half the day over the particular period of time to fix the problem and tell people at the outset when we can expect to have the exercise properly completed.
The truth of the matter is that what GPL is doing is desperately unfair to consumers. It is hedging its bets, appealing for patience while neglecting to say exactly when the ordeal will be over. It clearly wants the best of both worlds, hence the long-winded explanations about the rehabilitation process in circumstances where no one gives ‘two hoots’ about the process. The business sector and the ordinary citizen, both, simply want to know clearly, unambiguously, when we will finally put our blackout woes behind us.
The President of the Georgetown Chamber made another telling point. The blackout binge is coinciding with a building boom, with signs of growing middle-class affluence and the attendant increase in demand for hi tech, modern electrical appliances, for computers and the like. “People should be able to buy and use what they want without having to bother about power supply,” Chintamani told me.
The sense of public resignation associated with the fact that nothing can be done except to wait for GPL to do what it says it is doing lends a sense of pointlessness to its routine PR salvoes. The man from the vulcanizing shop told me that he never reads the papers. “What is the use. We have to accept what they say. We can’t really change anything.” In a way this makes people cynical about the media, about Mr. Brassington’s call for “patience and tolerance.”
The man from the vulcanizing shop made the point to me that even if we wanted to do anything different we really had no choice but to be patient and tolerant. My mind went to the eventual opening of the rehabilitated facility, some time down the road and the expressions of appreciation that will be written into speeches from the powers that be for the patience and tolerance shown by consumers and the collective “yeah, right.” from those who will trouble themselves to listen to what the assembled officials will have to say.
Bharrat Dindyal, GPL Chief Executive Officer had agreed to see me last Monday. I had to postpone the appointment and another opportunity simply never came. “Meetings,” his Secretary told me. I have met Mr. Dindyal before, He is an amiable man who appears to have an understanding of the problems of the power company. The last time we had met he had told me that apart from the ageing infrastructure there was also the issue of fuel costs. I suspect that I didn’t really miss much by not meeting him this time around since the technical explanations that he would, perhaps, have offered would probably have added nothing new to what people want really want to know, except, of course, he was able or inclined to set a firm date for an end to the blackouts.