COMMENTARY: Why Is Antigua And Barbuda The Worst In The Region?

WHY IS ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA THE WORST IN THE REGION

………..by Yves Ephraim

In a regional conference hosted in St. Kitts, the Caribbean Telecom Union (CTU) which is an institution created by regional governments, published the results of a study, ranking each member state’s cybersecurity maturity. 

Antigua and Barbuda was ranked last. I am not at all surprised.

If you live in Antigua and Barbuda you are no stranger to extended periods of deprivation of pipe-borne water, even in a record breaking year of rainfall; As a resident of Antigua and Barbuda, you are accustomed to paying high prices for air through your water pipes;

You are accustomed to frequent power outages. In fact, no business can afford to operate without a standby generator.

It is even ironic that most state-owned entities, themselves must have their own generators. 

Having to maintain your own generator is just part of the cost of doing business in Antigua and Barbuda. 

I was very surprised to learn that our St. Kitts neighbour seldom have power outages. This I discovered when discussing with an IT colleague his decision to migrate to St. Kitts and setup his IT business there. 

Most people are not aware of how high and unreliable electricity and communications cost contribute to our high cost of living.

Antiguans and Barbudans are accustomed to paying the highest prices with the lowest reliability for basic Internet Services.

The one common denominator that is contributing to all this is our government’s policy and its state-owned monopolies of utilities

and telecom.

For too long have the people of this country been gaslighted into thinking that Antigua and Barbuda was a trailblazer in telecoms and utilities, but now the evidence lays bare for all the world to see. 

Now, even Antigua and Barbuda’s regional peers are saying that our internet, cybersecurity, utilities and telecom infrastructure are crappy.

Successive political administrations have made a mess of our telecom environment and utility services while our OECS neighbours have moved ahead in leaps and bounds. You know we like to compare!

You have to ask, why is internet services in the other OECS territories so superior to Antigua and Barbuda when they all have the same Flow and Digicel service providers that we have? The answer is clear!

Antigua and Barbuda attempted to take advantage of an opportunity to take a share in the Internet Nomads market during

Covid but there again, we failed miserably. We failed on all metrics including, unreliable electricity and exorbitant internet service prices.

Our government’s wanton and hostile protectionist stance has been eliminating service choices for the residents of Antigua and Barbuda. 

We are all forced to put up or shut-up with the poor service that the state-owned telecom and utility services provide.

Even more egregious, is our government’s surreptitious plot to force the other telecom competitors out of business by denying them the licence to offer internet fiber to their own customers. 

What our government has been doing can be compared to limiting

the car dealerships to sell only 1990 models of cars, while the state-owned car dealership is free to sell 2024 models at the same price. 

No normal thinking Antiguan and Barbudan would pay for the 1990 models particularly for the same price as the 2024 models. 

Therefore, as a consequence, the government has effectively being putting these other companies out of business because normal thinking people will dissert the other companies for the government’s car dealership’s 2024 models. This is what our government is doing deliberately to the other telecom service providers.

Whatever your opinion of Flow, Digicel or ACT, allowing these entities to compete freely renders choice to the consumer and keeps a check on high prices. For a very long time, the telecom market has not been allowed by government to be truly competitive. 

Our government tries to convince us that being the only provider would be better for us, but what has been our experience? We pay the highest electricity rates and have the most unreliable water service.

Many Antiguans and Barbudans have been fooled to think that owning our own telecom company is beneficial. The reality is, that as a taxpayer you wind up paying high prices for unreliable services while also being saddled with a national debt that was incurred to run these mostly unprofitable state-owned telecom and utility

companies. A double whammy, if you will. 

Can you believe, that our government would rather incur debt than to allow willing private companies to invest and then collect taxes from these private companies? Does that make sense to you?

As if that was not enough, our government is now aiming to destroy cellphone services by threatening the other telecom service providers to accept a one-sided deal to offer mobile number portability. 

Expect to see your phone number disappear into thin air when you try to move your number from one carrier to the other. Our government has a track record for messing things up. 

Do you really want your cellphone and internet services to be run like your water and electricity services?

You can usually gauge someone’s future performance by their previous behaviour.

Do you really trust our government to get this right? 

It is high time for us to push back.

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