1980s, HERE WE COME

FINANCE Minister Colm Imbert’s broad hint of a review of free public healthcare is another pointer that Trinidad and Tobago is reversing to the quality of life experienced in the miserable 1980s.

High unemployment, steep prices, cuts in public officers’ salaries and a virtual national wage freeze, huge debt, and rationing of foreign exchange were among austerity measures when the bottom fell out of the economy.

There was prolonged economic collapse following the oil boom of the previous decade.

The cut-and-dry International Monetary Fund (IMF) was invited to provide a “standby facility.”

That is an innocuous term to indicate that the IMF ensured that revenues matched spending – and to hell with people’s suffering.

When then-Prime Minister George Chambers delivered a Budget lacking an economic recovery plan, Express Editor Owen Baptiste wrote that “it is reason for rage and rebellion.”

The Government had failed to tap into agriculture, industry and other areas of the economy, Baptiste wrote.

Calypsonian Tobago Crusoe identified society’s ills in his stinging monarch-winning song, concluding: “Trinidad has no right to be bawling now.”

The current situation has stark similarities, even if the Rowley Government does not confess that the nation is virtually bankrupt, with declining revenues, major borrowings and an economy still based on a floundering energy sector.

Apart from targeting healthcare, Imbert noted that the Budget deficit is widening even as oil production is 50 per cent of what it was a decade and a half ago and natural gas output has slumped by 35 per cent over the past 10 years.

He is depending on collecting more taxes through the Revenue Authority, imposing the Property Tax and inflicting tariff rate increases on water and light bills.

This is a formula similar to Chambers’ slash-and-burn method of the 1980s.

The solution according to both Chambers and Imbert is to bleed taxes from citizens instead of earning more revenues through expanding and modernising the economy.

In a single Budget, Chambers doubled the costs of drivers’ permits, postage stamps and other nuisance taxes,

He increased alcohol and tobacco taxes by 50 per cent.

He sent up the costs of obtaining vehicle licences and services at various Government departments.

He introduced taxes for certificates of police certificates and other basic facilities.

That was only in one year.

He was raising money chirrup-chirrup.

And still, Chambers patted himself on the back, saying his measures were “essential, prudent and timely,”

That’s much alike Imbert’s declaration that he “can see clearly now” despite poverty, joblessness and the widening wealth gap.

Imbert warned last week that the Government “will soon be faced with very difficult choices in terms of maintaining the current levels of subsidies, grants, free services and social programmes.”

He is clearly singing from the Chambers hymn book.

There are still no efforts at boosting agriculture and reducing the onerous $7.3 billion annual food bill.

Food is imported by a well-heeled closed group of business elites with ties to the ruling administration.

Like others before him, Imbert has expounded on sectors for diversification, including technology, finance, maritime services, widening of manufacturing and other industrial endeavours.

Indeed, diversification has been a buzzword for decades.

Apart from not delivering on his promises, Imbert has played fast-and-loose, insisting as recently as his last Budget address that the country is on a growth path.

The truth is that there was a nominal revival from the dramatic slump of the Covid-19 years.

But our financial state is wretched and the immediate future is gloomy.

Corruption and waste are still prevalent, according to those in the know, despite the watered-down procurement law.

There is no urgency along the corridors of power.

T&T is walking back to those burdensome days of the 1980s.