Dear Editor,
The Minister of Public Infrastructure Hon. David Patterson took to social media (Facebook) to vent his frustration about the positioning of the Vreed-en-Hoop to Kingston submarine cable; Patterson identified this positioning as a poor political decision by the PPP and as the culprit for this round of power shortages. Patterson’s perspectives are often interesting as they offer insight into how his mind works and his own decision-making process.
To ascribe a technical decision, good or bad, as a political one, is more reflective of how Patterson has operated than would have obtained under the previous administration. PPP Ministers of government would accept that the technical people would know better than Ministers who are political appointees charged with policy formation and implementation. The Patterson way of thinking suggests that ministers are infallible, ‘know it all’ entities with abilities to ‘fix’ any issue with personal knowledge and/or intervention.
Minister Patterson’s logic has led us into this ever increasing quagmire of power outages and electricity shortfalls; it began with his soft `nationalization’ of the Wartsila Company that provided a wide range of services to Guyana Power and Light (GPL). These services included acting as the authorized country dealer for Wartsila, design, procurement, installation and maintenance of power generation engines and units. In this process the Wartsila company was stripped of its contracts and its 90% of its employees were offered jobs with Patterson’s new creation, Power Producers & Distributors Inc. (PPDI).
This decision had three immediate consequences: 1. Loss of upper management knowledge and proven ability to deliver quality service. 2. The PPP negotiated ‘List minus 17 percent’ price on all spares 3. The inability to handle design and construction of large new projects, such as the 300MW natural gas facility desired by ExxonMobil.
Editor, in less than two years, this policy decision by Minister Patterson has led us to the situation where the prime Wartsila generation sets are all well behind accepted maintenance schedules; where substitute parts are being used in Wartsila engines; where PPDI is not given the 17 percent discount on spares and is forced to join queues for parts and not afforded special status as the local Wartsila company which had no such issues.
To add to these woes, we have the strange fact that despite years of complaining about the use of China National Machinery Import and Export Corporation (CMC) while in opposition, Minister Patterson performed a volte-face and now utilizes CMC on a myriad of projects. It would be interesting to get an explanation on that decision. In four years no major increase in power generating capacity has been planned, begun or implemented. The installation of two heavy-fuel containerized generating sets in Charity is hailed as ‘the big success’ in the sector by the APNU-AFC coalition.
The lack of foresight used in formulating policy in this critical sector added to the convoluted logic of Patterson’s mind, has us all in the dark with vague promises of a ‘fix’ somewhere in the future. This is as unacceptable as the coincidence of two submarine cables being damaged in one week. Something fishy is in the river and it ain’t the fish!
Yours faithfully,
Robin Singh
