Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Util­i­ties Mar­vin Gon­za­les is one of those min­is­ters who has set­tled in­to his work with­out too much politi­cis­ing and en­gag­ing in de­cep­tive ac­tions and state­ments. Sure­ly, how­ev­er, his at­tempt to con­vince the coun­try that the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the T&T Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) rate in­creas­es rec­om­mend­ed by the Reg­u­lat­ed In­dus­tries Com­mis­sion is not of suf­fi­cient im­por­tance for con­sid­er­a­tion, dis­cus­sion and pos­si­ble im­ple­men­ta­tion, is not an ar­gu­ment that can be ac­cept­ed.

“The mat­ter is still be­fore the Fi­nance and Gen­er­al Pur­pos­es Com­mit­tee, I don’t think that this mat­ter would ever progress dur­ing this year. I think we have a lot more that we are fo­cus­ing on at this time,” Gon­za­les said when asked about the sta­tus of the mat­ter and whether the Gov­ern­ment is stay­ing away from it in this elec­tion year to avoid se­ri­ous neg­a­tive re­ac­tion by the elec­torate.

Ef­fec­tive­ly, how­ev­er, Min­is­ter Gon­za­les was at­tempt­ing to play games with the in­tel­li­gence of the pop­u­la­tion, ap­pre­cia­tive of the fact that gov­ern­ments gen­er­al­ly avoid mak­ing de­ci­sions in the build-up to an elec­tion which may be un­pop­u­lar and can de­ter vot­ers from choos­ing to re­turn them to of­fice.

Da­ta pre­sent­ed by the min­is­ter on­ly a cou­ple of months ago show that T&TEC owes over $6 bil­lion to the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny for fu­el it has used to gen­er­ate elec­tric­i­ty but not paid for; and that sev­er­al gov­ern­ment min­istries and state agen­cies owe T&TEC over $2 bil­lion for elec­tric­i­ty con­sumed but with out­stand­ing pay­ment.

Con­tem­plate the sit­u­a­tion: a large quan­ti­ty of nat­ur­al gas be­ing sup­plied to T&TEC is not be­ing paid for both in a time­ly fash­ion and if at all; that a ma­jor pas­sage out of the prob­lem is di­rect­ly re­lat­ed to Gov­ern­ment ac­cept­ing and im­ple­ment­ing the RIC rec­om­men­da­tions, in part or in whole, to al­le­vi­ate the heavy bur­den on both the NGC and TTEC; that the RIC has rec­om­mend­ed that con­sumers, do­mes­tic and busi­ness, must pay more to lift part of that load, yet those com­pli­cat­ed debt and pay­ment is­sues do not amount to a mat­ter for im­me­di­ate and se­ri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion by the Gov­ern­ment, is re­al­ly an un­ac­cept­able propo­si­tion put for­ward by the min­is­ter.

But the width of the prob­lem does not end there. The re­al­i­ty is that nat­ur­al gas is not be­ing brought to the sur­face in great abun­dance to the point that it can be sup­plied with­out pay­ment by T&TEC, rather than be­ing di­vert­ed to a cus­tomer who can pay for it. Now, it will be in­dus­tri­al sui­cide for NGC to cut off sup­plies of nat­ur­al gas to T&TEC with­out throw­ing the en­tire econ­o­my and so­ci­ety in­to a night­mare. But to sug­gest that even dis­cus­sion on the im­ple­men­ta­tion of a rate hike to al­low the elec­tric­i­ty com­mis­sion to be able to con­sis­tent­ly pay for its sup­plies of gas, is far from be­ing a log­i­cal and ac­cept­able sug­ges­tion for the Pub­lic Util­i­ties Min­is­ter to make.

One of the core dif­fi­cul­ties of a gov­ern­ment in of­fice plan­ning to de­fer dis­cus­sion and de­ci­sion-mak­ing on such an is­sue, is that on the day af­ter the elec­tion, the coun­try, and whichev­er par­ty is elect­ed to of­fice, will still have to at­tend to the prob­lem as out­lined above.