The late Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning had a say­ing that To­ba­go gets what it wants.

This was of­ten said in the con­text of the PNM be­ing in cen­tral gov­ern­ment in Trinidad dur­ing the 2001 to 2010 pe­ri­od and the Orville Lon­don To­ba­go Coun­cil al­so be­ing in charge for most of that time.

The two To­ba­go seats have be­come bell­wether seats, of­ten vot­ing for the win­ners in cen­tral gov­ern­ment elec­tions and cru­cial­ly pro­vid­ing a path for the rul­ing par­ty to a gen­er­al elec­tion vic­to­ry.

It is this, more than even the con­trol of the THA, that has giv­en the is­land so much po­lit­i­cal sway and the ac­knowl­edge­ment by the two ma­jor po­lit­i­cal par­ties that when it comes to To­ba­go nah trou­ble trou­ble, trou­ble nah trou­ble you.

In this con­text the PNM has been pre­pared to ac­qui­esce as far as it can to the dic­tates of the 70,000 peo­ple on the is­land, ac­knowl­edg­ing that be­ing sep­a­rat­ed from Trinidad in the uni­tary state, there are spe­cial de­vel­op­men­tal needs, but al­so ac­cept­ing it car­ries the risk that fail­ure to give To­ba­go what­ev­er it de­mands could re­sult in elec­toral dis­as­ter.

For the UNC, a par­ty that has its base in the East In­di­an pop­u­la­tion, there is fear that ob­ject­ing to the de­mands of To­ba­go could be seen through the lens of race. To­ba­go hav­ing a pop­u­la­tion dom­i­nat­ed by peo­ple of African ori­gin. It is why the UNC does not con­test the two seats, hop­ing to en­ter through the back door by cur­ry favour­ing with who­ev­er is in gov­ern­ment.

I have tak­en the time at the start of this ar­ti­cle to put in­to con­text some of the po­lit­i­cal is­sues that dri­ve some of the eco­nom­ics in the re­la­tion­ship be­tween T&T.

This is cru­cial be­cause while the To­ba­go Amend­ment Bill re­mains stuck in the Low­er House there is a rag­ing de­bate about the fu­ture role of To­ba­go in the union.

The Amend­ment Bill deals with many of the pro­posed le­gal and po­lit­i­cal arrange­ments be­tween the two is­lands. I do not pro­pose to deal with these is­sues since my fo­cus is on the eco­nom­ic mat­ters, but these are very im­por­tant vari­ables in de­ter­min­ing the eco­nom­ic re­la­tion­ship be­tween To­ba­go and Trinidad.

Un­der the present arrange­ments, the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly gets by law at least 4.03 per cent of the na­tion­al bud­get. This is usu­al­ly some­where around $2.3 bil­lion. The pro­posed leg­is­la­tion will lift that min­i­mum about to over six per cent and some back of the en­ve­lope cal­cu­la­tions sug­gest that would add at least an­oth­er $1 bil­lion a year to the THA’s an­nu­al al­lo­ca­tion and un­less the coun­try gen­er­ates more rev­enue it es­sen­tial­ly means one bil­lion less to spend in Trinidad.

There is much to be said about that in terms of whether those fi­nan­cial arrange­ments are be­ing put to use in the best way, whether To­ba­go’s in­fra­struc­ture is sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter than ar­eas like La Brea, Ma­yaro, Rio Claro, Tabaquite, all ar­eas that pro­duce oil and gas that gives the gov­ern­ment and coun­try so much of its re­sources which is then trans­ferred to oth­er parts in­clud­ing To­ba­go.

We must ask whether it is okay for the THA to spend so much mon­ey on re­cur­rent ex­pen­di­ture by keep­ing 60 per cent of the lo­cal work­force em­ployed. This has the im­pact of hav­ing the ma­jor­i­ty of To­bag­o­ni­ans seek­ing and hold­ing on to a THA job. It is a drain on the rev­enues of the THA and it al­so leads to the crowd­ing out of the pri­vate sec­tor’s ac­cess to labour and has the im­pact of dis­tort­ing the labour mar­ket.

This is­sue is even more im­por­tant es­pe­cial­ly when you con­sid­er the rum­blings in To­ba­go and the sug­ges­tion by at least one po­lit­i­cal en­ti­ty that has made it clear it wants a two-state de­vel­op­ment for To­ba­go and Trinidad.

The Peo­ple’s De­vel­op­ment Par­ty (PDP) has a fly­er cir­cu­lat­ing in To­ba­go that sug­gests the need for one Union but two states and high­lights what it sees as To­ba­go’s wa­ters.

There has been a lot of mis­in­for­ma­tion per­pe­trat­ed by some peo­ple in To­ba­go that the is­land’s eco­nom­ic per­for­mance would be sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­proved if its wa­ters were recog­nised and that the $2 bil­lion-plus net trans­fers to the is­land is a mis­un­der­stand­ing since it is ‘To­ba­go wa­ters’ that a lot of the nat­ur­al re­sources are lo­cat­ed.

It is true that some of the coun­try’s re­cent dis­cov­er­ies are clos­er to To­ba­go than Trinidad and in par­tic­u­lar north of To­ba­go in the deep wa­ter.

The lat­est are BH­Ps Ca­lyp­so field, Shell’s Col­ib­ri de­vel­op­ment TT­DA 3&7 and the NC­MA de­vel­op­ment.

What wor­ries me is some of the lead­ing play­ers in To­ba­go, par­tic­u­lar­ly those sup­port­ing the Op­po­si­tion PDP, have sought to fool, yes fool the peo­ple in To­ba­go about re­sources.

Can you imag­ine that the PDP’s fly­er is sug­gest­ing that these re­sources are in ex­cess of $180 tril­lion? That is more than 10 times the size of the en­tire US econ­o­my.

So the PDP, which is sup­posed to be a se­ri­ous po­lit­i­cal par­ty with sig­nif­i­cant sup­port­ers in­clud­ing some To­ba­go econ­o­mists who I of­ten hear speak on En­er­gy and are nei­ther en­er­gy ex­perts or are clear­ly out of touch with the re­al­i­ty or the eco­nom­ics of the en­er­gy fi­nan­cial mod­els.

The To­ba­go pop­u­la­tion must know that the sug­ges­tion that Ca­lyp­so or any oth­er gas de­vel­op­ment means utopia is just not on the cards.

Are there any dis­cus­sions about the sig­nif­i­cant cap­i­tal costs to build out the in­fra­struc­ture for Ca­lyp­so? Is there any dis­cus­sion about the need to re­cov­er the sunk costs in the ex­plo­ration pro­gramme that led to the dis­cov­ery? What price will the gas be sold at and what will be the tax­es or prof­it un­der the PSC. It must be un­der­stood as a fron­tier de­vel­op­ment, gov­ern­ment’s take is low­er un­der the terms of the PSC. We have to en­sure that in To­bag­o­ni­ans mak­ing de­ci­sions about their own fu­ture in this still uni­tary state that they are aware there are con­se­quences.

The no­tion that has been es­poused by for­mer Chief Sec­re­tary Ho­choy Charles that To­ba­go’ in­ter­nal self-gov­ern­ment is for To­bag­o­ni­ans alone is not sus­tain­able. In­de­pen­dence maybe, but once To­ba­go is go­ing to get mon­ey from the trea­sury it’s a mat­ter for the en­tire coun­try and To­ba­go can­not al­ways get what To­ba­go wants.