Greetings, everyone
All facility companies in Venezuela are in bankrupt.That will go down in history as part of hugo chávez's legacy. Electricity services are not the exception. I will just narrate a personal anecdote as way of illustration.
The guy you see in this picture is helping us fix our most recent electrical problem. His official work is security personell at a school. But he makes about $2 a month there. He can get $5 for every repair like this. He can do 5 or 6 a day. We had to hire him after waiting for almost 24 hours for the electricity company to send someone to check. We learned that some neighbors had been waiting for 4 days, some even longer. This guy belongs to a generation of itinerant workers who are earning a living doing what utility companies used to do in the past but which the current ruin of their infrastructure and personnel has rendered them unable to do.
We live in an old colonia house, with terrible roofing and worse wiring. We have been having sort circuit for years because the cables are very old and replacing them is extremely expensive. Over the years we have witnessed the electricity company's increasing problems to respond to emergencies. They say they have only one truck running to answer the calls of a 400,000 people-town.
One of the main reasons why these companies go bankrupt is populism. Socialist governments sell the offer of free or almost free services because the State is supposed to provide the citizens of a country with equal access to basic services; therefore, tarifs must be accessible. But, what happens when the prices are so low you, as a company, cannot even collect them because the system cannot process insignificant amounts? That's what happens since March 2018 when the Bolivar Soberano "replaced" the Bolivar Fuerte. This "monetary reconversion" was just a massive devaluation aggravated by zero increase in the basic services (water, electricity, internet, phone). We have not paid water or electricity since then. The phone/internet companies did make some adjustments, yet, their services are the worst in the continent.
Many people cannot afford to pay a repairman, who is, by the way, risking his life without adequate safety equipment, and they have to wait for weeks, sometimes months for their problems to be solved. We were able to have the cable that comes from the post replaced and some parts of the internal wiring repaired until we buy some 20 meters of cable for a more thorough work.
One of the reasons for our shortcircuits is the use of electrical stoves, which have become very common here now that domestic gas is hard to get. For old houses, with old cables, these appliances are a time bomb. But, what choices do we have?
This is Venezuela, a massive Catch-22.
Thanks for stopping by
