The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Your front page story on our PM’s Solar Energy Plan prompts me to raise a point that I think has merit, in the case of BEC/BPL (could we please revert to the former name now that the foreigners are gone ).

As a Bible believing country we may well debate the matter of the sins of the father being born by the children or the family, but in the context of BEC and the woes that continue to curse it as a business, I firmly believe that we are casting a blind eye to what the problem really is, and if we opened our eyes maybe a different and more sensible path could be considered.

The BEC woes that it continues to struggle with are neither its fault nor mine. For 50 plus years now BEC (and all of the other Government dependencies ) have been run as the various Governments of the day hobby horse. Decisions have never, (until recently) been made in the interest of that business and we now know that certain families, friends and lovers, have been exempt from paying for their own electricity, and to a large extent I understand that the government itself, in this same time frame has been exempted from paying for electricity. As a country, or Sovereign Nation, as we like to say now, we have collectively starved this enterprise of the cash that it ought to have had to operate and we have made dreadful business decisions, that have resulted in the physical plant now being on its knees, if not prostrate on the ground.

And because of the sins that we the voting populace of fifty years have inflicted on this organization, it is now left only with the option to try and survive by bleeding the very lifeblood out of its current day customers, who were not the original cause of its problems.

So let’s put the penalty where it ought to be and that is on the entire country. Whatever the debts of BEC may be, and whatever may be the cost of getting up to date infrastructure, those are costs that must be borne by us all. Yes, a NATIONAL DEBT FUND should be created to allow BEC to be a proper functioning business that can be competitive with electrical suppliers in other countries like ours, and provide a consistently reliable supply at a reasonable cost to the end user.

Electricity is the backbone, the heart and respiratory system of every business in this country, including even the cost of running the government, and when its cost is so dramatically higher than our international competitors it places the entire NATION at a competitive disadvantage.

So, what is the difference of leaving the debt and infrastructure where it is, or taxing the people to support a debt fund that would be used to bring it into the modern day world ?.

I am by no means an economist but if one is to believe what they say, it is only through business growth and success (and that is profitability ) that a business can grow, and when it grows, it makes more money and it hires more people and it pays more taxes.

I would guess that our major hotels are the greatest consumers of electricity and with the debt and infrastructure costs that they have to pay for electricity, they must struggle to even break even.

Solar energy is fine and the electrical supplier should be looking into this but with its current economics they probably struggle to get from one day to the next financially.

Maybe someone could quantify what such a fund would have to look like.

One Caveat! We will certainly need transparency and anti-corruption legislation for this to work.

BRUCE G RAINE

Nassau,

January 19, 20