There is probably no socio-economic issue in the past four decades or so that has either impacted our society or on public discourse as the reliability (or lack thereof) of our national electricity system. At a very basic level it has become a national provocation, the periodic denial of power rendering consumers numb with rage and helplessness to respond to the sudden removal of the ability to perform certain basic functions, beginning with routine domestic chores.
There is, as well the much broader more profound frustration as the unreliability of power supply intrudes on the national production process, in offices and to far greater effect in places like hospitals where the weak and vulnerable are discommoded and in what one might call the productive sphere, factories and other centres of production where the vicissitudes of power supply play an absolutely vital role in the ultimate economic outcome.
So that when, over time, you add damaged appliances, storage-related compromises that have a bearing on food spoilage, damage to costly machinery, an increasing feeling of misery and frustration arising out of unpredictable power surges that retarded production processes, resulting in loss of income and damage to export markets, you can easily drift into a condition of despair. Add to all this what in numerous instances has been the appreciable costs associated with securing power supply through means outside of the national electricity grid and all of this has been pretty tough to bear.
If there are no reliable figures on the cumulative cost of our retarded electricity supply system over the decades, some rather telling empirical evidence exists in some instances. For example, entire sub-sectors in our food production sector, agro processing being one of the better examples, have been severely retarded by unreliable power supply. Tellingly, the attendant higher cost of power has impacted significantly (how significantly it is difficult to say) on the competitiveness of our agro-products, particularly on the external market. In effect, one of the fastest growing niches of the agricultural sector continues to be unable to maximize what is widely believed to be its considerable potential on account of uncompetitive electricity costs.
Much the same challenge confronts the timber industry where reliable electricity lies at the core of the value-added dimension to the production process and where the competitiveness shoe pinches the sharpest.
Over time, and without coming even remotely close to a long-term remedy in the process, successive political administrations have sought to place the blame at the feet of their predecessor. Frankly, one set of fulminations have more or less cancelled out the other since none of them have come even remotely close to resolving the crisis.
Meanwhile, and in a multiplicity of ways, our development as individuals, as families, as communities and as a nation, has been considerably placed on ‘hold.’
Much of the rancour that has existed between government and the manufacturing sector, over the decades, has reposed in the latter’s protestations over unreliable power supply and its impact on production and productivity and the attendant high cost of buying-in power. Government’s response has been, to a large extent, to concede that fixing the problem is beyond its financial means and that the longer-term solution reposes in one or a mix of non-fossil fuel alternatives. Arguably, the discovery and imminent exploitation of oil may have changed the game somewhat, though public discourse on an ‘oil economy’ has had to share the public limelight with the Green Economy discourse being championed by the President and which, in its global context, frowns on a proliferation of fossil fuel.
All of this means, of course, that we are yet to bring a persuasive clarity to the discourse of how and when Guyana’s electricity woes will finally end. And the more we talk about an economy whose development trajectory seems set to be guided by the exploitation of our oil resources and the deployment of those resources for concerted development, the more it must dawn on us that we cannot afford to wait much longer to find a long-term solution to our electricity woes.
