We are now jour­ney­ing to our 63rd year of In­de­pen­dence, and our fi­nal bud­get be­fore the next gen­er­al elec­tion.

The mood of In­de­pen­dence was not re­al­ly cel­e­bra­to­ry this year. The fu­ture is hazy, the present tough. How like­ly is it that the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance will of­fer an elec­tion bud­get de­signed to make peo­ple, who just don’t feel that good now, feel bet­ter in Oc­to­ber? One can nev­er be sure.

The rea­son peo­ple don’t feel so good now has to do with the eco­nom­ic, fi­nan­cial, per­son­al safe­ty, and po­lit­i­cal con­di­tions of the im­me­di­ate present. Life is hard, every­thing costs more, wages are not suf­fi­cient. And in­fra­struc­ture is break­ing down every­where, ser­vice is of poor qual­i­ty, and every­thing seems hard­er than it should be. Jobs are scarce.

Gov­er­nance is cal­lous, ar­bi­trary; the cli­mate of pol­i­tics is vex­a­tious and di­vorced from so­lu­tions that peo­ple want and need.

The killings just con­tin­ue, every night, every day, any­where! And, talk aside, no one has a plan to re­duce gang­ster­ism and ķillings, nor to en­sure pub­lic safe­ty. It may have tak­en us 62 years to get here, but here we are. The gap be­tween lead­ers and cit­i­zens is so wide and get­ting to growth, re­cov­ery and cit­i­zen se­cu­ri­ty with the same poli­cies, ex­treme­ly un­like­ly. How to live with this?

Does the 2025 bud­get re­al­ly mat­ter, then? How would this bud­get be dif­fer­ent from the oth­er nine, and, in any case, why would it be dif­fer­ent in the first place? What dif­fer­ence could any bud­getary ac­tion make at this point?

You may be think­ing that I am be­ing neg­a­tive. No. It is not my na­ture. I try to see the good in things, in peo­ple, in events and cir­cum­stances. But it would be ir­ra­tional not to ac­knowl­edge that things can be neg­a­tive some­times.

You see the prob­lem with 62 years of In­de­pen­dence is that you can’t go back. You can’t un­do any­thing. What is done is done. You can re­flect on it, analyse it, make sense of it, learn from it, but the past is gone and the fu­ture is com­ing at you re­lent­less­ly. What­ev­er the fu­ture might of­fer, it meets you where you are. To leap to some­place more de­sir­able, ahead, you have to make a hard­er ef­fort and maybe ex­ert a dif­fer­ent kind of ef­fort. Dif­fer­ent and big­ger, maybe even, bold­er.

Will a gov­ern­ment take such a leap in an elec­tion-year bud­get? Or will the fo­cus be on a bud­get to win the elec­tion? The tragedy, of course, is that if the bud­get is meant to help you to win, that bud­get might be bad for the coun­try in the long run. Why? Be­cause what a gov­ern­ment needs to do in the best in­ter­est of the coun­try, might not be pop­u­lar with the elec­torate. In oth­er words, what needs to be done to gov­ern re­spon­si­bly and well, may cause un­easi­ness, re­sent­ment and a back­lash.

So be­yond the bud­get, in their elec­tion cam­paign, the Gov­ern­ment might out­line a per­spec­tive or plan, but it would al­so have to ex­plain just how we will get there as a coun­try and what we will be do­ing dif­fer­ent­ly. Be­cause the Gov­ern­ment will be car­ry­ing ten years of in­cum­ben­cy bag­gage. A pack­age of promis­es too dis­con­nect­ed from cur­rent re­al­i­ty could test cred­i­bil­i­ty. Will they be be­lieved?

What can the Op­po­si­tion do? First of all, the last five years of Op­po­si­tion per­for­mance can­not be erased. Sec­ond­ly, none of the Op­po­si­tion par­ties will pledge to con­tin­ue PNM poli­cies. They will cam­paign for change. On that there will be uni­ty; be­yond that un­pre­dictabil­i­ty, volatil­i­ty. But the Op­po­si­tion say­ing that they are op­posed to what the in­cum­bent Gov­ern­ment is do­ing or pro­pos­es to do, is not enough. The Op­po­si­tion, in what­ev­er form, will have to say what they will do and why; and what dif­fer­ence it will make. Or else what is the point, if those seek­ing to gov­ern are de­void of so­lu­tions for a coun­try in cri­sis?

It can­not be enough for the Op­po­si­tion to re­spond to the bud­get alone ei­ther. It must in­di­cate what its own poli­cies would achieve over the next five years that would make 2030 seem like a cred­i­ble quan­tum leap from 2024. And that means the Op­po­si­tion must dis­play a re­al­is­tic un­der­stand­ing of where Trinidad and To­ba­go is now, and what we need to do, with vis­i­bly com­pe­tent, cred­i­ble min­is­te­r­i­al ma­te­r­i­al, to get out of this rot and ad­vance as a coun­try and peo­ple to safe­ty, se­cu­ri­ty and shared pros­per­i­ty.

Peo­ple want so­lu­tions. They are not see­ing any. And if no po­lit­i­cal par­ty has so­lu­tions, then the elec­torate has no re­al op­tions and there­fore no choice. What­ev­er lit­tle en­thu­si­asm ex­ists, will be curbed.