Open mind
There is something about the Amaila Falls Hydropower project that haunts this writer. There was nothing unique about the project because hydropower has been around for a long time in the world. Though exceedingly small, Guyana had a hydroelectric facility at Tumatumari. Besides, Guyana tried to build a much larger one than the Amaila project before. It is not the cost of the project either, even though the hydropower project that Guyana tried to build in the 1970s would have cost about the same as the Amaila Falls project and supplied about 10 times more the amount of energy than Amaila Falls would have done. This writer has already condemned the leadership that was given to the effort by the Ramotar administration to bring hydropower to Guyana. Whoever advised him not to make a deal with the AFC in 2013 so that the project could go forward, could not have had his best interest at heart.
Yet, there is a lesson in Amaila that goes beyond the obvious economic concerns related to its limited capacity and high cost. For this writer, that lesson is that we must keep an open mind at all times no matter how much an issue provokes one’s sensibilities. Had the PPP/C administration done so, it would have been clear that, despite its deficiencies, the Amaila Falls project carried with it some useful intangible benefits for the country that could have persuaded naysayers to support its construction. These intangibles were apparently regarded as useless by the PPP/C government given its decision to let the project go.
The Amaila Falls project did not start on a good footing and quickly gained the attention of the nation with a series of controversial decisions on the construction of the access road and the hydropower plant itself. That first set of concerns surrounded the