TWO rather serious things caught my eyes, in two of the daily prints. The $5B allocated to GPL, and Minister Ramsammy’s comments on the budget cuts affecting all Guyanese.
The $5B is not enough. The rising cost of oil and gas on the world market, spells out the answers. Fuel prices recently jumped from USD$114 to USD$120 per barrel. Funny, but I don’t believe that one needs to be a rocket scientist to do the Math.

GPL will not be able to ‘light up our lives’ without enough money, and apparently the five big ones just won’t cut it.
Without help from the government, it means GPL will be load-shedding and this means more frequent blackouts. In this particular case, it would be decisions made, in Parliament, by the opposition parties, with their combined one-seat advantage, to cut the allocations to GPL.
There is that real threat of going back to the ‘ole’ black days, and nights. BLACKOUT!

As it stands right now, GPL needs more like $25B, just to cover fuel costs.
So how does the opposition expect this entity to operate efficiently? What about the private sector and production capabilities, as examples. How are they to function?
We are going backwards!

What’s good for the goose is now good for the gander, because all of us will suffer, including the APNU and AFC supporters, and poor people of this country, bearing the brunt of bad decisions made.
So I trust that when the load-shedding begins, and our children cannot study, or life on the whole becomes unbearable, we would cast our minds to the fact that APNU; and the AFC, are responsible.

I hope then, that all those opposition ‘fat-cats’, like Carl Greenidge, Volda Lawrence, Nagamootoo and his side-kick Ramjattan,  are able to accept the game they played, for what it is.
I suppose that may not be a problem for them, since most, or all of them, can afford a generator.

The Minister of Agriculture, in a passionate statement reminded us that the budget cuts will ‘cut’ us all very deeply. Take the Low Carbon Development Strategy  (LCD), for example. These cuts will affect programmes like the One Laptop Per Family [OLPF] project.
Those who cannot afford a computer, like the indigenous people, the poor and the needy; and the disabled folk, will be locked out from the advantages of accessing Information Technology, so vital in a developing country like Guyana.

The available bandwidth we have here has almost outgrown itself, since more and more people are bombarding the internet services, to access needed information, or just for entertainment purposes.