The Tribune

WILL they raise prices at BPL? Won’t they? Will the government throw a subsidy at BPL to avoid a price rise? Won’t they?

Don’t you get a bit tired of all this slow-drip way of telling us whether we will be dipping into our pockets to pay for BPL’s increased fuel bills?

Although make no mistake, we will be paying for those bills – it’s just a question of pay now directly in the bill or pay later when we have to fill up the government coffers that they’ve emptied to cover the costs in the meantime.

The issue comes up again after Minister of Works Alfred Sears pointed out the decision facing the government.

He said: “BPL cannot absorb increases, so there are only two options, one is to pass it on to the consumers or for the government to provide a subvention to pay and the Prime Minister has made it very clear that the government is committed to providing a measure of safeguard for the consumer given the fact that, in many homes, people’s lives have been disrupted by employment, through death and illness as a result of the pandemic. We still have a lot of climate refugees in our country, people who were displaced by Hurricane Dorian.”

Earlier this week, Mr Sears said that no decision had been made yet on whether to increase electricity bills.

Meanwhile, the BPL chief executive, Shevonn Cambridge, has previously said that a review is under way to determine whether there will be an increase by a fuel charge adjustment.

No decision is, however, still a decision. It is a decision to delay any action to tackle the problem at hand. If the bills being paid by customers don’t cover the cost of buying the fuel, it’s an extra debt that mounts up.

As Mr Sears noted yesterday, BPL cannot absorb increases anyway – so a lack of action even brings questions of legality.

Adding extra cost to electricity bills is, of course, politically unpalatable. Mr Sears is absolutely right that there are many people still affected by the pandemic and Dorian. In yesterday’s Tribune, a report highlighted that Bahamians lost an estimated $2.4bn in wages in total between 2020 and 2023. That’s a big hole, and not in deep pockets.

Speaking of big holes, any subvention to cover BPL’s costs would leave a sizeable one in the Budget plans. There is no mention of such a fund in the proposals just presented.

And if there was going to be an announcement made on BPL costs, and the financial impact that would have on BPL itself, its customers and the government’s Budget, we ought to expect it would come not from Mr Sears but from someone higher on the political scale – this would be one for the Prime Minister himself.

So as this will they, won’t they continues, and we get strung along while we wait for any supposed decision, it’s no surprise that we get frustrated and just want some straight answers.

We know fuel prices have gone up. So who’s going to pay for it? It’s a simple question.

Settlements

Settlement agreements have been in the news lately – largely because of settlements reached with the new leadership in the police force.

Both new Commissioner Clayton Fernander and Deputy Commissioner Leamond Deleveaux recently settled a 2019 lawsuit with the government, just in time to take up their appointments.

The merits of the lawsuits themselves aside, and how much suffering individuals endured when they were still employed, even if not in the post they might desire, there is the question of whether such settlements should be secret.

Both the police leaders have confidentiality agreements on their deals, even though they are both public servants, settling with a public body in the government and if there is a financial component to the settlement, paid with public money.

Against that, there is the question of how much business it is of the public to know details of an individual’s settlement. Public servants or not, these people are also citizens.

Moving away from any individual case, and thinking more about general principles of government, the concern generally with settlements made with public money is to ensure such funds are not misused, that an incoming government doesn’t use those funds to put money into their supporter’s pockets. That someone who is an opponent of one government doesn’t get an unknown amount of money awarded to them for no reason.

There is a balance to be struck – and that’s a balance we may not have at present. Transparency isn’t something government in The Bahamas is blessed with in abundance, and unknown out-of-court payments does nothing to bring further clarity.

The question is, what will is there on either political side to change that?