The Tribune

YOU blame me and I blame you and are we ever nearer the truth?

That is sometimes the feeling one gets when one sees the accusations and counter-accusations in Parliament.

The to-and-fro yesterday was over the state of Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) – with Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis and FNM leader Michael Pintard arguing over where the blame lies.

The thing is – there is plenty of documentation to show what is going on with BPL, if we could just take a good look at it all.

Take the $150m bill owed by BPL – which is branded a “significant unfunded liability” in the government’s latest Fiscal Strategy Report. Look back at previous reports and that warning over such a large liability is not there – so from where has it emerged?

Well, Minister of Works and Utilities Alfred Sears previously said that $90m was owed to Shell in fuel arrears. It ought to be a simple matter to publish the bills versus the payments made to see when those arrears began to mount.

From October last year, the government was to make payments of $10m a month to Shell towards those arrears, continuing until June this year – so not all of that $150m should be those arrears. But a simple accounting of when arrears began to amount should be easy to demonstrate.

So where is the rest of the debt from?

When the decision was made not to proceed with renewing the fuel hedge, it meant we ended up spending more for fuel than if we had done so.

Mr Pintard puts that as a potential lost saving of $100m.

Then there was an extended period where BPL was not passing on increased costs to customers – which of course meant it was either operating on a reduced margin, or a loss.

All of these are relatively simple accounting items to lay out – so if we really want to see where the BPL debt has come from, all it takes is a bit of clarity in showing the accounts.

Of course, BPL has been a problem for many years, whether under its present incarnation or in its past life as BEC.

Year after year, there have been problems with consistent electricity generation – there was another power outage yesterday that affected more than half of New Providence – and finance issues.

There’s plenty of blame to go around over the decades for the mess of a legacy we have been left with.

But certain elements of the current situation don’t need to be a mystery.

Let’s start with that Shell bill – show us when those monthly bills were paid in full and when they were not.

Do we anticipate such a rush towards transparency? No. It took long enough to get to the point where Mr Sears admitted he had seen recommendations about the fuel hedge scheme.

Mr Davis meanwhile talks of that $150m as being legacy debt. He says it is “nothing to do with the hedge” and says it is a “debt that has been failed to be paid by the FNM”. Fine – show the receipts.

Given we’re still waiting for the receipts for the PLP jaunt to Bermuda that was paid for by the government and then supposedly fully reimbursed, we might wait on the receipts for this.

But it’s a simple matter really – if the paperwork is on your side, publish it.

If the paperwork is not on your side, then maybe one is better served by arguing about it and pointing fingers rather than showing the evidence.

Either way, it is all of us who will need to pay that $150m debt – one way or another.