By Mark DaCosta- The second largest parliamentary opposition says that despite unprecedented oil wealth and six years in office, the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) government has failed to deliver a reliable electricity supply to Guyanese. The main opposition, A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), contends that the administration knew well in advance — from its own pronouncements and international warnings — that demand for power would surge with the oil boom, yet never produced a coherent national development strategy to link generation, transmission and distribution to the country’s rapid growth. The opposition further argues that the much-vaunted Gas-to-Energy project at Wales has fallen badly behind schedule, that conservation appeals shift blame onto ordinary citizens, and that the test of leadership is delivery, not lavish spending of oil money — a test the government, in APNU’s view, is failing. The coalition delivered its views in a statement dated September 7.
Six years after returning to office on the promise of transformation, the People’s Progressive Party/Civic administration finds itself facing an uncomfortable question from the political opposition: with billions of dollars in oil revenue flowing into the national coffers, why are Guyanese households and businesses still enduring an unreliable electricity supply? A Partnership for National Unity has pressed that question forcefully this week, pointing to figures released by the Guyana Power and Light Company in early September, which showed available generation of 265.6 megawatts against a peak demand of 257 — a margin so thin that the utility itself conceded its reserves were inadequate and that feeders and transformers across the network were overloaded. What makes those numbers particularly damning, the opposition argues, is that just weeks earlier, GPL had projected that dependable capacity would reach 280 megawatts by the end of August. Someone, APNU insists, must explain where those missing megawatts went.
The opposition’s case rests on the claim that none of this should have come as a surprise. Well before a single barrel of crude was lifted from the Stabroek Block, international institutions were sounding the alarm. In 2019, the International Monetary Fund advised that unlocking Guyana’s anticipated growth would require substantial infrastructure investment, including a significant expansion of GPL’s generation and transmission capability. Senior figures within the PPP/C government echoed that assessment after taking office in 2020, with one minister publicly conceding that ageing transmission and distribution infrastructure was making it difficult to deliver electricity to homes and enterprises. The President himself declared that demand would nearly triple within a handful of years and that the grid would need wholesale modernisation. APNU’s contention is simple: the government possessed the knowledge, the money and the time — roughly six years and unprecedented public resources — and still allowed power shortages to become a stranglehold on the economy.
What the country lacks, the opposition maintains, is not individual projects but a coherent national development strategy — a plan that connects housing programmes, industrial expansion and rising consumption to generation capacity, transmission lines, distribution networks and routine maintenance. Scattered contracts and ad hoc purchases of generating equipment, APNU argues, do not constitute planning, and adding generation at one end of the system while communities at the other end remain starved of dependable supply is no solution at all.
The controversy has sharpened around the Gas-to-Energy project at Wales, long promoted as the centrepiece of the government’s energy agenda. Testing of the first turbine is now targeted for early December, with an initial 57 megawatts expected to feed into the grid — a far cry from the full first phase of 300 megawatts originally promised. The opposition recalls that Budget 2022 projected construction beginning that same year and completion by 2024, and that the Prime Minister had confidently stated the Wales facility and Amaila Falls together would supply 415 megawatts to meet the country’s base load. Four years on, even testing remains pending. APNU is demanding that government publish distinct, credible timelines — one for testing, another for dependable supply, and a third for the cheaper tariffs the project has long been touted to deliver.
The utility’s appeal to consumers to conserve electricity has also drawn fire. While acknowledging that responsible consumption has its place, the opposition contends that asking citizens to use less power — after the government itself forecast extraordinary demand growth — amounts to making families the scapegoats for official failure. When the lights go out, it is ordinary people who pay the price: spoiled groceries, lost trading hours for shopkeepers, and study time stolen from children.
APNU has put forward a concrete list of demands, including an immediate outage-reduction plan with community-specific repair deadlines, weekly public reporting on generation availability and outages, and full disclosure of project costs, contract variations and milestones. The party is also calling for an independent mechanism to assess compensation claims arising from proven utility failures, together with genuine enforcement of contractual penalties and accountability for officials who fall short.
The opposition contrasts this record with that of its own time in office, noting pointedly that first oil flowed in December 2019 and the inaugural petroleum payment arrived in March 2020 — after the APNU administration had left office. Oil revenue, in other words, was never at the previous government’s disposal, yet by APNU’s account the country enjoyed a stronger record of generation, distribution and maintenance on far leaner budgets. The broader message is that the oil windfall has not made the PPP/C more effective; rather, in the opposition’s view, it has exposed gaps in competence, planning and execution. For a nation now rich but still flickering in the dark, APNU’s conclusion is blunt: our country deserves power it can trust, bills it can afford, and leaders who answer for their governance.
