ON Friday January 15, 1999, then-Education Minister Dr. Adesh Nanan told the House of Representatives of a policy of the Panday Government.
“While the previous administration had a report and never acted on it,” Nanan said, “this Government took the initiative to standardise textbooks.”
Planning Minister Trevor Sudama, in rare parliamentary picong, snapped: “They had it on the drawing board. It was either on the drawing broad or in the pipeline.”
The subsequent Manning Government scrapped the policy, permitting a resumption of the scam of making nominal changes and forcing hard-pressed parents to buy new books.
In his latest Budget address, Finance Minister Colm Imbert, in typical agitated manner, spoke of “ever-changing booklists, which are unwarranted in the areas requiring little change.”
As a result, the Government is standardising to “eliminate the need for unnecessary new textbooks…”
If the country hadn’t known better, we would have sworn that the excitable Imbert had hit a policy goldmine.
That was the tone of his exhausting Budget address.
There was a rehash of annual themes – food security, even though the annual import bill is now a staggering $7.3 billion; three per cent unemployment while relying on the same Central Statistical Office that the PNM in 2015 branded “of questionable value.”
Lofty tourism promises were revamped in the midst of travel advisories from the developed world not to visit Trinidad and Tobago “unless absolutely necessary.”
We were reminded of the inefficient seabridge, WASA and TTEC even while the Government is throwing billions of dollars in annual subsidies.
A two-year-old WASA report – that revealed 3,300 surplus workers and five layers of management – has not been implemented.
Every few months there is a sea ferry fiasco that costs taxpayers’ large sums and results in food shortages in the sister isle.
Government agencies are the utility companies’ major defaulting clients.
There was not a word on the rotting refinery or the various sectors repeatedly identified for economic diversification.
Imbert stressed on investments but a United Nations agency earlier this year said T&T was the only Caricom country with a net outflow – meaning that more multinationals were leaving than coming in.
He crowed about one-time grants to public sector workers in a land in which the cost of food has gone up by as much as 100 per cent since 2016, along with increased transportation and housing prices.
There were no measures to tame inflation.
A 17 per cent rise in the minimum wage is not sufficient to take thousands out of grinding poverty.
The struggling small and medium-sized business sector requires assurances of equity in foreign exchange allocation and general support to get back to their pre-Covid-19 glory.
The minister was spirited on digitisation but it still takes months to register a business, handle insolvencies or get an electrical connection.
The most elementary public sector service – provision of birth certificates – was recently grounded for weeks.
The boss of the energy business Chamber recently said there are 33 approval processes in the sector, some still being done with hard copies.
Community policing is returning years after being senselessly scrapped and after hundreds of bloody home invasions.
There were no measures for skills training, modernising the economy, improving traffic flow, and rescuing the ailing health sector.
The Government recently built a $133 million car park in San Fernando while still refusing to construct a $72 million cardiac laboratory at the nearby hospital in spite of the high incidence of heart problems.
And so on in a predictable budget of rehash, revamp and repeat.
