IT is ironic that the government’s feel-good budget session came the day after President Paula-Mae Weekes finally found her voice about the state of the nation.
On Independence Day, President Weekes asked: “How the France (did) we get here?”
Trinidad and Tobago is “a wilderness,” Weekes said, as her single term as Head of State races to an end.
She pronounced T&T to be a land of “brazen criminality, ugly divisive politics, rampant unemployment, distressing reports of child abuse and troubling poverty.”
Like Rip Van Winkle, Weekes awoke to reality, admitting that our country “is not what the architects of our independence intended and envisaged six decades ago.”
She acknowledged that “not too long ago … as a nation, we were full of pride in ourselves… justifiably the envy of our Caribbean neighbours.”
But, singing from their partisan hymn book, Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley, Finance Minister Colm Imbert, and their acolytes, painted a T&T in vibrant economic recovery and a settled society.
With another sleight of hand, Imbert suggested that the current energy price windfall indicates the good times are here again and the small man’s hardship is over.
But the mass of unemployed, those struggling to send children to school and to pay bills, losing their homes to banks, or tortured by crime, didn’t get the memo.
Not bothered, Rowley set off on another safari, although not reporting any successes from previous lengthy – and costly – expeditions.
According to the World Bank, T&T is suffering the worst direct foreign investment outflows in the Americas, a sharp reversal from US $1.5 billion annual inflows a few years ago.
The bank’s Ease-of-Doing-Business metrics are a guideline for prospective investors, and T&T has sunk to 105th in the world, with no discernible efforts to undo the catastrophic decline.
That debacle translates into job losses and absence of new employment opportunities, forfeiture of scope to earn foreign exchange, and continued failure to diversify the one-horse pony economy.
When you add the cost of living being at a 40-year high, the small man is not sharing the glorious boom being promoted by a detached government.
Rowley’s statement on the retail sector reminds us of the limited concentration of wealth, and the fact that the rich is getting richer.
Bob Marley, the enduring mouthpiece of the working class, said it best: “Dem belly full but we hungry.
“Ah hungry mob is ah angry mob.”
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