Georgetown : Just days after an Alliance for Change (AFC) team visited Linden, one of Guyana’s six established towns, to listen to the native’s concerns, the party was met with word of a policy that will represent the “final nail in the coffin of Lindeners.”
This is according to AFC Chairman, Khemraj Ramjattan, who said that the party was shocked at the least upon hearing of the policy as it relates to the electricity tariffs for the people of Linden.
The AFC Chairman said that there can be no doubt that the decision was a vengeful act on the people of Linden as a result of their voting persuasion on November, 2011, when Guyana held its Regional and General Elections.
During the presentation of the 2012 Budget for Guyana, the Finance Minister, Dr Ashni Singh said that since the privatisation of the bauxite operations in Linden and the Berbice River, Government has been subsidising electricity rates in these communities.
“Currently, in Linden, electricity costs between $5 and $15 per kWh, while on the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) grid customers pay an average of $64 per kWh.”
He said that the total cost of this electricity subsidy was $2.9B last year, the equivalent of 10 per cent of GPL's total revenues.
The Finance Minister announced that starting this year, “reforms will be initiated to the tariff subsidy with the aim of giving effect to a progressive alignment of the subsidised rates with the national rates that are applicable on the GPL grid.”
The electricity bill that Lindeners have been accustomed to paying for several years now will skyrocket.
It has already drawn an angry reaction from members in the Opposition circles.
Ramjattan firstly pointed to the fact that after years of economic starvation on the part of the administration for the people of Linden, some have only recently begun to recover with some small cottage industries being established.
Ramjattan says that what this new policy means is that those businesses will quickly be rendered unprofitable further complicating the economic situation that Linden faces.
The AFC Chairman then pointed to the average household consumer who will quickly see their electricity bill skyrocket by multiples of hundreds of per cent.
Ramjattan said that his party will be pushing strongly for the Government to maintain the subsidy for Linden’s electricity generation until such time that it is financially sound for the people of Linden to be able to pay for the increased tariff.
The team of Executive Members of the AFC that visited the mining community recently included Moses Nagamootoo, Nigel and Cathy Hughes, Gerhard Ramsaroop and Kojo McPherson, along with political activist Frederick Kissoon.
