……..or how our coo-coo got cooked
By Ken Ali
IN September1973, Dr. Eric Williams announced he was chucking the job of Prime Minister.
“Like a bridge over troubled waters, I will lay me down,” Williams told a PNM convention, quoting a popular song of the period.
A group of influential party loyalists later convinced him to withdraw his resignation.
The conventional wisdom was that Williams threatened to quit in frustration because the treasury was almost bankrupt.
After that drama, policy planners urged Williams to diversify from economic dependence on hydrocarbons.
Just then, an oil embargo related to a Middle East conflict led to a price bonanza, and Trinidad and Tobago was transformed to the Dubai of the Caribbean.
In the stupor of new-found wealth, giddy Trinis guzzled expensive whiskey, splurged on bling and appliances, and travelled to Miami to lime.
Williams infamously intoned: “Planning has lost its mystique.”
Diversification became a distant plan.
Williams stopped speaking to. and then suspended, senior public servants.
By the time Williams died in office in March 1981, boom had turned to bust, and George Chambers inherited a tottering economy.
Rainy day funds were depleted, and one-in-four youth was jobless.
There were no measures to wean the economy off energy dependence.
Chambers taxed virtually everything that moved and breathed.
He was duly swept from office in 1986, and A.N.R. Robinson walked into an empty financial cupboard.
Robinson slashed public officers’ earnings and maintained the tax yoke.
He launched his own mantra of economic diversification — but took no appropriate measures.
The public”s pain made him hugely unpopular and he faced a bloody attempted coup.
Patrick Manning, a survivor of the 1986 PNM washout, picked up the diversification lingo.
But hydrocarbon remained the dominant economic driver.
In addition 77 000 acres of arable lands were laid to waste, and the annual food import climbed to its current $8 billion.
High unemployment and general hard times drove Manning from office, and Basdeo Panday extolled a Singaporean model of services and manufacturing.
After his return to the crease. Manning committed to diversifying into maritime operations, financial services, telecommunications and other sectors.
Again, no action.
The administration of Kamla Persad-Bissessar attracted non-energy investments, and constructed infrastructural projects in medical and sport tourism.and other fields
The investment spurt was overturned during the years of Dr. Keith Rowley. partly because of the declining natural gas feedstock.
T&T slumped to 105 in the global ease of doing business index. gas shortfall shut down much of the prized Point Lisas and ALNG, and mismanagement put out the lights at the Pointe-a-Pierre refinery.
A generation after the initial diversification buzz, T&T was now reliant on a cross-border maritime gas field.
Rowley shamelessly conceded that without that lucrative project, “our coo-coo is cooked.”
Once again, T&T is scrambling to balance recurrent spending, including paying public officers who endured a decade without salary increases.
Ironically, Colm Imbert. Rowley’s decade-long financial under-performer, has morphed into a public critic.
We are back to the future with diversification.
Singapore, meanwhile, has become one of the wealthiest global economies. extremely business-friendly, with virtually no unemployment.
If only we had turned talk into action.
If only…
