STATEMENT FROM THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS
The Board of Directors of Simon Bolivar University, meeting in an extraordinary session on March 13, 2019, agreed to address the university community and the national public to express its position in the face of the critical reality that exists throughout the country as a result of the collapse of the electric service which occurred in the afternoon hours of Thursday, March 7.
The current crisis that the national electricity sector is undergoing is the result of the sum of problems that were timely warned by specialists from Simon Bolivar University in 2010 in the report “The USB before the Crisis of the Venezuelan Electric Sector.” Then, not only was the vulnerability of the electric system’s generation, transmission and distribution indicated, but it also foresaw the structural actions that had to be immediately undertaken to avoid catastrophic consequences and the impact on other basic systems intended to guarantee the minimum conditions of survival and quality of life of the population; such as health and sanitation, communication, personal mobility, basic production and distribution of food, medicines and other goods and services, all of which constitute a real and daily scenario that repeatedly violates human rights and the minimum constitutional guarantees of all Venezuelan society.
Eight years later, the Board of Directors of Simon Bolivar University, in a statement released after its extraordinary session of March 21, 2018, also warned about the drastic deterioration of public services of electricity, water supply and environmental sanitation as a result of the disinvestment in infrastructure. Indeed, the situation has only worsened. Public disinvestment, brain drain, de-professionalization, neglect and clientelist management of the workers’ socioeconomic conditions, as well as the squandering of resources, the lack of transparency and accountability in the public management of the sector, demand immediate corrective actions from those responsible for national public policies that deal with the humanitarian problems in which the Venezuelan people are immersed.
Simon Bolivar University, aware of its social responsibility in the creation, development and application of knowledge, is committed, as it has always been, to the entire Community and the Nation, to collaborate with the different sectors of the society, supporting with all our capabilities the development of solutions that allow for conditions of social, economic and political stability to guarantee the quality of life of all citizens.
Given, signed and sealed in the Benjamín Mendoza Room at Simon Bolivar University, in an extraordinary session of the Board of Directors on the thirteen (13) days of March, two thousand nineteen (2019).
