ESCALATING protest action in Linden over the progressive adjustment to the electricity tariff and altercations with security forces have botched major current and impending foreign investments in the bauxite town, causing worry about the prolonged setbacks.
Prime Minister Samuel Hinds opined that it may take a decade before Linden can rebuild and recover the status it once held as a terminus for Guyana’s interior and hinterland regions.
“It’s a major blow, it could be a 10-year setback for the community,” Prime Minister, Samuel Hinds said in a recent panel discussion with Minister of Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh on the television programme “Under the Microscope, Understanding the Linden Dilemma and Unrest.”
The town that opposition forces claim is economically depressed, in their string of political assaults on the government, was built on a bauxite industry that over the years became uncompetitive.
It was however kept alive by a string of investments that the government invited over the years, which sought to create the conditions for the company to expand and create more job opportunities.
Investments outside the pool of the bauxite industry, such as Information Communication Technology, forestry and agriculture were also identified to lay the foundation for development of the town.
Bosai had advanced a US$200M production and expansion plan for calcined bauxite that would have created 1000 new jobs, the Toucan Call Centre in Linden had been up and running with a staff complement of 125 Lindeners, and Bai Shan Lin had plans to set up a large wood processing facility a few miles from Linden.
The construction of the Amaila Falls Hydropower Project would have automatically placed Linden as a logistical hub for trucking, haulage, shipping and other auxiliary services for such investments.
“At the start of this year, we could have quite comfortably said that the long-term future of Linden looked extremely bright, brighter I believe than it has been for decades, and then you have this situation and in the space of just a few weeks, and indeed a few days, you have this situation,” Minister Singh said.
Unrest in the town has now forced cessation of operations at Bosai and the Toucan Centre, which Minister Singh fears would be a tragedy for Linden as more buildings continue to be razed by fire in the ongoing tension.
Prime Minister Samuel Hinds, who served as an engineer in the town for over 25 years, recalled the numerous attempts in the past to get a call centre up and running, and was heartened to know that operations finally got underway.
The acts that have been perpetrated over the recent weeks, including the arson attack on the One-Mile Primary school, was condemned as irrational by the two panelists who chronicled the wanton blocking of roads and destruction of government and private properties by opposition- backed protestors.
“What we have been witnessing, particularly in the more recent days, is a wanton descent into lawlessness and it’s an extremely overwhelming development,” Minister Singh said.
In defending Lindeners as law-abiding citizens, he blamed factions foreign to the town for infiltrating and instigating the tension in a plot to destabilise the government.