money for nothing – jud lohmeyer

Money for Nothing by Jud Lohmeyer

Jagdeo’s whole hearted adoption of the Mckinsey MBA whiz kids strategy of getting paid to watch trees grow extends beyond Guyana. The Jagdeo government has extended the doing nothing for money to Brazil Telecom. Guyanese are paying, for the last six month and years into the future, the Brazilian Telephone company for the Internet capacity that may one day be available via the Providence to Brazil fiber cable. This is capacity Guyana does not need with the new GT&T undersea cable which is expected to have more then enough capacity for the foreseeable future and two back up cables for redundancy. Guyana will not go without dial tone anytime soon. The Providence to Brazil cable scheme was developed to create leverage over GT&T during the liberalization negotiations. Now Guyanese are stuck with the us15 million dollar bill for an unnecessary cable. So today GoG is building a cable to no where that the country doesn’t need and will be instantly obsolete once a new road to Lethem is constructed. The cost to lay the cable under a new Lethem road is one tenth the cost to lay a cable under the existing road.

The Telecom Liberalization legislation was pulled at the last minute at the end of 2010 Parliamentary session as Jagdeo got the concessions HE wanted from GT&T. Allowing the renewal of the GT&T monopoly for another 20 years means Guyana remains economically uncompetitive as it is burdened with a 20^th century monopoly telecommunications arrangement for another two decades. The liberalization concessions Jagdeo squeezed out of GT&T? HE got them to agree to allow data services to be offered by private companies from the GoG coastal fiber cable. Then HE gave those franchises to his PPP political cronies at eNetworks and Broadband Satellite. Makes one wonder who Jagdeo is serving, Brian Yong or Guyanese? But this is transformational!

Who is running this boondoggle white elephant? None other then the PPP Presidential candidate’s son, Alexi Ramotar. So now we have the PPP Presidential candidate and his son on Jagdeo’s payroll. This starts to look a bit like a sweet campaign contribution from the Guyanese taxpayers to the PPP candidate. Who ever heard of a Presidential candidate being hired as a Presidential Advisor AFTER he becomes the Presidential candidate, usually one resigns when one runs for office. I warned several months ago that Jagdeo had no intentions of leaving office and would likely find a weak puppet candidate.  I never imaged HE would be so obvious in his tactics. I find it quite telling of HE’s view of Guyanese. HE believes the people don’t get it. Offer them a laptop election day bribe and they will walk to the polls deaf, dumb and blind to vote PPP/L(laptop).

So today no cable, no Internet but monthly Internet payments. What a deal HE cut. If you are a doubter that the GoG can build, run and maintain an extremely sophisticated fiber optic networks that requires lasers and uninterpretable power supply at Providence, Mabura, Iwokrama, Bina Hill and Lethem, stay tuned. (Stop laughing, this is transformational!) If any site looses power, the entire cable goes dark. The road to Lethem under which the cable is being laid is another unlimited source of challenges. If the road washes out so goes the cable. Do you recall a year when the road didn’t wash out? You don’t get a couple of boys from CCM to run over and fix it. You have to reconstruct the cable bed, re-lay the cable, splice each of the individual glass fiber threads, secure protecting armor insulation then conduct extensive testing before returning the cable to service. No down and dirty quick fix to get the cable operating. Splicing fiber optic cable is not your every day project in the middle of the rain forest on a washed out road. But then Guyana don’t need the cable other then providing high speed Internet to the above mentioned sites. So no one along the coast may notice that the cable is broken. But the good news is, regardless of the status of the cable or even if the cable capacity is used, Guyana is still paying for the Internet capacity!! Along with the father and son team aiming to be Guyana’s next President and heir apparent. It’s your tax dollars hard at work!