Dear Editor,

It appears that we Guyanese have lived with incompetence for so long that our senses and standards are dulled. We have been treated in recent days to the spectacle of governmental confusion and amateurism on a grand scale and at the highest level in the matter of government policy on the GPL. The facts are simple:

1. We have a Prime Minister who has consistently articulated the case of the investor rather than the case of his government or the people of Guyana.
2. We have a Prime Minister who consistently excuse or defends the incompetence on behalf of the people of Guyana. His defence of the CDC/ESBI venture as the best arrangement possible is now exposed for all to see as arrant nonsense.
3. We have a Prime Minister who clearly and unequivocally justifies the emasculation of an independent watchdog in the PUC and clearly sees the role of the PUC as a poodle of the investor rather than as an honest broker between the business and the consumer. It is clear that the best protection for the consumer would have been an independent PUC not the shell of a body emasculated by the government.
4. We have a Prime Minister who continues to carry out and articulate these dubious and indeed scandalous positions in the face of clear pronouncements in the opposition vein from the President of the country and the government's official press spokesman, Dr Luncheon.

Mr Hinds should cease his role as defender of what is now clearly a disgraceful and untenable situation. His defence of the new rate hikes now make him clearly a tool of the company rather than a servant of the people.

The government cannot escape the responsibility it must bear for the mess in which we now find ourselves. Mr Hinds should have the decency to resign and if he does not have the will and moral fibre to do so he should be dismissed.