MINISTER within the Office of the Prime Minister with responsibility for Public Affairs, Kwame McCoy, has rejected recent claims by Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed that the community of Swan, along the Soesdyke/Linden Highway, has no access to electricity or water, calling the claims “false, misleading” and accusing sections of the media of repeating them wholesale without basic verification.
McCoy, in a statement on Tuesday, said the clearest evidence against the narrative is contained in the very reporting used to build it.
He pointed to an online report in which Swan residents spoke of households being “disconnected” and described the hardship of families currently “without electricity,” including the need for assistance with “restoring electricity services.”
That language, the minister argued, only makes sense if a service already existed.
“How can residents be disconnected from an electricity service that supposedly does not exist,” he asked, noting: “and how can they seek restoration of a service to which the community supposedly never had access?”
On the facts, McCoy said Swan has access to the national electricity grid and that residents there are able to access formal electricity service. For households not yet ready to make that transition, he said, solar panels were provided to ensure they continued to have power.
He gave a similar account of water access, saying Swan has a formal water supply system in place. Individual households may experience issues with connection, service or payment at any given time, McCoy said, but that cannot honestly be transformed into a claim that the community has no access to water at all.
The minister accused Mohamed of having “manipulated and repackaged” information to create the false impression that basic infrastructure has never been extended to Swan.
He framed the episode as part of a wider pattern in which a claim is made, built into a political narrative, and then repeated and amplified “with little attempt at verification” — even when the evidence contradicting it, he said, is “sitting in plain sight.”
Looking ahead, McCoy said the government will continue working closely with Swan residents to bring more households fully onto the formal electricity and water systems, adding that “much of this work is already advancing.”
