Lindeners are incensed at Government’s decision to increase their electricity tariffs to gradually bring them on par with the rest of the country and parliamentarians intend to bring a motion to the National Assembly to outline the conditions in the mining town and the historic context in which Linden electricity is placed.
At a press conference held at the Office of the Leader of the Opposition on Hadfield Street, APNU parliamentarians Vanessa Kissoon and Reverend Renis Morian, Chairman of Region Ten Sharma Solomon and former Member of Parliament E. Lance Carberry explained A Partnership for National Unity’s position on the issue.
They all argued that the increases in tariffs should be done in stages and only after programmes to turn around the fortunes of the mining community are implemented.
Solomon said that it is not that the residents do not want to pay the increases, but that they cannot.
He charged that the hike is more about how the people of Linden voted on November 28 than to do with conservation or bringing Linden on par with the rest of the country in terms of electricity tariffs.
According to Solomon, pensioners in Linden and Region Ten will now have access to 50 kilowatt hours instead of the 300 that they were afforded.
He said that this increase which the Government is representing as modest will see a pensioner’s bill increasing by as much as $12,000 per month.
Solomon said that the people of Linden and Region Ten should not be made to pay for the incompetence of the Guyana Power and Light. He said that the people in the city and on the coast are paying more than they ought to for electricity.
Morian said that the people of Region Ten have been experiencing an organised programme of under-development.
He said that nobody in their right minds will accept a tariff increase at this time. He said that since the talks between the Government and the Opposition during the time of the budget debate, there has been no movement on any of the planned activities that would have generated gains for the people of Linden. He said that there has been no movement on the Linden-Lethem road, the Linden Economic Advancement Programme or successor programmes or on drainage and irrigation projects.
Morian said that the genesis of the problem is with the Government selling off the steam turbines that Lindeners had come to rely upon for electricity and replacing them with diesel engines which were more costly to operate. Further, he said that the Government slapped down a programme that would have introduced low energy bulbs.
Speaking about the motion, Carberry said that it is unlikely that it will be tabled and debated before July 1, when the new rates are to be implemented. But he said that the aim of the motion is to draw attention to the issue.
During the budget debates, Prime Minister Sam Hinds announced that Government would have been commencing its realignment of electricity tariffs in Linden since the yearly subsidy was becoming unsustainable.
Amid subsequent talks between the government and APNU, Hinds told Parliament that APNU had agreed to a phased increase of tariffs for Linden. This fuelled heated protests in Linden against the hikes which saw APNU leaders rushing up to the mining town to assure that they had not approved the hikes.
