By Peter Polack

Peter Polack

The electricity provider for the Turks and Caicos Islands was recently sold to a private equity fund properly called a wealth fund. Like many laws and other restrictions of the Caribbean there was no peer review or empirical analysis or government consultation with the people of those islands for the sale of a crucial asset of the country.

The good thing is that the gloves and masks are off as the foreign fund ownership of an essential service no longer has to have a facade of being a good corporate citizen or community interaction or feint of solar conversion.This is simply the pursuit of wealth and snouts go as deep in the trough of dividends as possible.

Caribbean electricity regulation are simply words used to prop up high rates on the weary consumers.

A recent exception is the Jamaican government pause on the license renewal of their Asian owned electricity distributor. This is even more significant given that Jamaica is not at the high end of electricity cost.

The purchasers of the TCI electricity supplier had better have obtained an ironclad guarantee of their license unless of course there condition is different in a British colony.

Some Caribbean essential services are not privately owned but their proprietors are the stock exchange of a far off country like in the Cayman Islands.

Caribbean governments and their voters should wake up to the fact that essential services require ownership by the people for the people. The conversion to a locally owned national solar supply would not only provides security against future fuel disruptions as the world descends into multiple conflicts but the acorn of that most important development, a sovereign fund.

Guyana seems to be the country best poised for a Norwegian type sovereign fund that began recently with oil money payments to every citizen.

They should not be alone in that necessary pursuit.

The astute Financial Secretary of the Cayman Islands has seen the writing on the wall where the political leadership has failed. He has called for a war chest of dollars from the nearly billion dollar budget of that small island or over ten thousand dollars per person.The next light bulb would be diversification of an economy overwhelming dependent on the much criticized and fragile financial industry.

Unless the consumers, voters or in some cases their new political representatives speak up in a commanding voice then the Caribbean will regress into the new colonial capitalism that makes hollow the guise of independence.

Time will tell.

Peter Polack is a former criminal lawyer in the Cayman Islands for several decades. His books are The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War: South Africa vs. Cuba in the Angolan Civil War (2013), Jamaica, The Land of Film (2017) and Guerrilla Warfare: Kings of Revolution (2019). He was a contributor to Encyclopedia of Warfare (2013). His latest book is a compendium of Russian espionage activities with almost five hundred Soviet spies expelled from nearly 100 countries worldwide 1940-88.