GUYANA Power and Light recently removed more than 55 illegal electricity connections along the Soesdyke-Linden Highway, many of them tapped by squatters occupying private land belonging to Dr. Charles.
It should have been an unremarkable act of routine enforcement. Instead, it has become the latest flashpoint in a troubling pattern: An Opposition prepared to defend lawbreaking whenever it senses a political opening.
Let’s be clear about what illegal connections actually do. They overload a network never built to carry them, straining transformers and feeders until equipment fails. They cut service to paying customers who followed the rules. And they put families, sometimes the very families the Opposition claims to champion, at real risk of electrocution and fire. None of this is abstract; it is measurable, documented danger that utility crews deal with in community after community.
Guyana already has a lawful path to electricity: Apply to GPL, follow the process, get connected safely and legally. Political leaders who genuinely care about vulnerable communities should be marching people to GPL’s door, not standing in front of illegal wires telling them their theft is justified. Encouraging residents to bypass the law while disregarding the rights of the private landowners whose property is being occupied is not compassion. It is political theatre dressed up as advocacy.
This crusade is being led by Azruddin Mohamed, who is currently fighting extradition to the United States on an eleven-count indictment tied to gold exports, covering money laundering and related fraud charges.
Whatever one makes of the merits of that case, the pattern it suggests is hard to ignore: A politician for whom breaking the rules is never quite the problem, only ever the inconvenience of being caught.
Recasting illegal connections as empowerment fits neatly into the same script that has defined his political rise, dressing personal and political convenience in the language of the people’s cause.
Guyanese communities deserve leaders who tell them the truth, even when it’s inconvenient. The truth is that squatting on someone else’s land and stealing power from the grid is not a shortcut to development; it is a shortcut to blackouts, fires, and families paying with their safety for a politician’s talking point. Property owners like Dr. Charles have rights. Paying GPL customers have rights. And the national grid, which every household and business depends on, cannot be treated as fair game whenever it is politically convenient to pretend otherwise.
A country cannot build safe, reliable infrastructure while its Opposition tells citizens the rules are optional. Guyanese across the political spectrum should be able to agree on this much: No one’s vote is worth someone else’s safety.
Reject the politics of lawlessness, and demand that anyone who wants to lead this country start by respecting the law themselves.
