By Jeremy Morgan
Latin American Herald Tribune staff

CARACAS -- President Hugo Chavez wants people to keep their showertime as short as possible. In yet another lengthy night-time discourse on radio and television earlier this week, Chavez explained that people only need one minute to shampoo their hair, another to soap their bodies and a third to hose themselves down and wash it all off. And no singing!

"Some people sing in the shower, in the shower half an hour. No, kids, three minutes is more than enough. I've counted, three minutes, and I don't stink, " he said during a televised Cabinet meeting.

There is a rationale behind all this; it's not that the president's suddenly against keeping clean, perhaps because "imperialist" yanquis are well-known for taking showers at the drop of a hat and at any time of the day.

"If you are going to lie back, in the bath, with the soap and you turn on the -- what's it called -- the Jacuzzi ... imagine that? What kind of communism is that? We're not in times of Jacuzzi?" Chavez said, to laughter from his ministers around him.

Venezuela is in the throws of what used to be clearly identifiable as the rainy season -- a distinction now blurred by global warming, although it's still the epoch of torrential downpours and, in between, ponderous clouds overhead rather than heavenly blue skies.

Despite the rain, there's a severe water shortage. Large parts of this city are now being subjected to official rather than undeclared rationing, in some cases of anything up to 14 hours a day without water. Officials finally confessed that there was water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink, and have now unveiled a "schematic" of when supplies would be cut off, and where.

Hence the presidential homily about not making a meal of taking a shower. But it's not just water that's in dire straits and in urgent need of presidential attention. The power grid isn't coming anywhere near up to scratch, either.

Oil-rich Venezuela has been plagued by five major black-outs across huge swathes of the country this year so far. Anzoategui state went without electricity for 12 hours on Thursday this week after yet another break-down in the system. In one town, people went out on to the streets at night to make known their displeasure at this latest failure (which also affected the Latin American Herald Tribune's international website repeatedly this week).

Coincidence or not, around the same time, Chavez was esconced with his senior ministers. They were discussing what to do about the persistent shortcomings of the electricity system.

Chavez decided to set up a new Electric Energy Ministry, and appointed National Assembly Deputy Angel Rodriguez to head it up. Rodriguez has presided over the energy and mines committee at the legislature for several years and in addition, according to Chavez, is "a worker, a great fighter, an honest man, studious" -- all of which was why he'd been picked for the hot seat.

By now, Chavez was talking live to the people, and making it quite clear he was not best pleased with the state of affairs in the power sector. One thing he particularly wanted to know was what was going on at state-owned electricity companies. "Here I have denunciations," he declared. "The bureaucracy, instead of diminishing, has increased." The same old people were in charge and they were being paid "very high" salaries.

The president of the national electricity corporation, Corpoelec, Hipolito Izquierdo, a retired general who apparently wasn't in the presidential firing line, warned that power demand was set to rise by 7.1%, despite the slowdown in the economy and considerably higher than the average 4.5 percent growth rate recorded in recent years.

The increase, it would seem, is largely down to greater demand from domestic consumers. Just why this is happening isn't clear, although one senior official claimed it reflected "the improvement in the quality of life of the population," by which he meant people's increased purchasing power, which was allowing them to buy more consumer products -- electric can openers are a still somewhat unknown quantity amongst the general population, for example.

Even if that's the case, it would appear that quite a lot of people aren't paying their bills. Cadafe, a subsidiary of Corpoelec which feeds electricity to about 80% of the territory making up the country, is sitting on a stack of unpaid bills worth BsF2.5 billion, or around $1 billion at the official exchange rate. Of this, some BsF869 million is due from domestic consumers in residential areas of high per capita consumption -- in other words, the better off.

Chavez unveiled an energy "rationalization and saving" plan, and ordered big state companies including the national oil corporation, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), to draw up plans for an "intensive reduction" in their energy usage during the next 15 days. Public offices would have to slash their consumption by 20 percent under a series of "severe norms" that Chavez had decreed into law that very same night.

There was also to be a "strategic commission" headed by Vice President Ramon Carrizalez to oversee the energy savings drive. This commission would include workers from the industry, and imports of electrical equipment which were not geared to low power usage were now banned.

Just how much tougher the new power-saving regime gets remains to be seen. But industry analysts say the solution isn't draconian cuts in consumption but action to cure long-running ills in power generation and transmission.

The government appears to recognize this, which doesn't necessarily mean it knows what to do. Earlier this year, Chavez announced that $20 billion was being allocated to repairing and expanding the electricity sector during the next five years. To date, however, details of what this program will actually consist of have yet to be spelled out in any detail.

In a separate development, six bingo halls and casinos in Caracas were abruptly shut down for 72 hours late Thursday night. However, this apparently had nothing to do with the rolling power crisis.
Instead, a sudden swoop by inspectors from the tax collection agency, Seniat, had found that things were not as they should be. Two other "clandestine" casinos operating out of a shopping mall were also obliged to close their doors.


Chavez Names Head of New Electrical Energy Ministry