MORE, MIA, MORE
I AM confident that if Mia Mottley ran this town, commercial banks would not be pulling down billion-dollar profits while a majority of nationals live under the poverty line.
Republic Bank has just announced a nine-month profit of $1.15 billion, a 10.6 per cent hike over the previous corresponding period.
A recent Central Bank study, meanwhile, reported that of those surveyed 80.3 per cent took home less than $5,000 a month.
This confirms, among other things, that the middle class is vanishing, as we have been reporting in recent months.
This gross inequity is a tinderbox for social chaos, including crime, unemployment, business closures, educational decline, and even more rampant poverty.
The Rowley Government has remained typically silent in the midst of the rich getting richer and poor unable to put food on the table and afford other daily essentials.
The disturbing state of the affairs is the fruit of the destruction of the small and medium-sized business sector, decline of the petrochemical industry, absence of economic diversification, and overall mismanagement of the economy.
The government is looking the other way as business monopolies – in pharmaceutical importation and other crucial sectors – are becoming entrenched and sliding up prices.
Redressing such glaring and alarming disparity in the quality of life requires visionary, courageous and insightful leadership from someone with a smart and conscious worldview.
Like Ms. Mottley, who is nominally the Prime Minister of Barbados but is the conscience of the developing world and of the working poor.
Speaking truth to power at the just-concluded global environmental conference in Egypt, she reaffirmed her pluck, to add to her crystal-clear vision on the urgent matters confronting humanity.
Her gutsy scolding of the developed world on climate change must be an epic declaration in north-south relations.
“We were the ones whose blood, sweat and tears financed the industrial revolution,” Ms. Mottley told the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP).
“Are we now to face the double jeopardy of having to pay the cost as a result of those greenhouse gases from the industrial revolution?”
Once again, she woke up the world to the critical urgency of climate change and the lazy and ineffective response of developed countries, some of which are overwhelmed by fossil-producing oil and gas companies.
“We need to have a different approach,” Ms. Mottley advocated.
Essentially, she is calling for justice and fair play.
“We have the collective capacity to reform,” she stated.
That transformative mindset and determination are required in Trinidad and Tobago, a once-prosperous nation that has slumped into a morass of hardship not experienced since the 1980s.
There is an overdue need to expand the economy, revive small business, tame the banks, boost food production, aid the self-employed and provide tangible support for the poor.
None of that would come from the Rowley regime, whose seven-year itch amounts to more directionless economic leadership.
For example, there are no official measures to realign onerous bank charges with customers’ inability to pay in light of reduced consumer demand, business shutdowns, and joblessness.
There are no policies to lift the poor and suffering, whose numbers are expanding as their kitchens become barer and barer.
In contrast, various progressive countries, including Britain, instituted programmes to have commercial banks more responsive to the plight of clients, especially amid Covid-19.
In T&T, the Ministry of Social Development is a misnomer, since it merely distributes hampers instead of implementing measures to make the deprived self-sufficient.
The obvious and worrying circumstances portray T&T on the slippery path to widespread societal suffering, even disorder.
Ms. Mottley’s command of the issues, her passion, along with the respect she enjoys would be a boon to a land in precipitous decline.
If only we could have her administer our national affairs and rescue this faltering society.
We must, however, urge her to continue to champion the burning issues of the developing world.
She has all the attributes of outstanding leadership.
