The People's Partnership Government's performance has fallen short of the promises they made in their election manifesto last year says economist Indera Sagewan-Ali. According to recent polls including last Sunday's ANSA McAL Psychological Research Centre's poll in the Sunday Guardian, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar's rating has fallen over the last year. The poll was done between April 18 and 28. "For the first year, the Government has not performed as of my expectations, and if you look at the polls, the expectations of the people," she said. "The manifesto is not in sync with their performance over the last year...The promises with the old age pension and the laptops were kept and people understood those are political promises that are not difficult to keep."
Sagewan-Ali told the T&T Guardian this yesterday, at the South Caribbean Conference of the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Eight Annual Celebration of Indian Arrival Day held at the SDA Church, St Augustine.
She added that the results of the poll should come as a surprise to no one. "I am not surprised by the results of the polls...What I have been saying over the past year are what people are judging the Government on," she said. "They are judging the Government on how they run the economy, on the issue of confidence in the business community, on the basis of a lack of a clear programme on where the administration is taking the country." Sagewan-Ali said people had the perception that the present Government was simply carrying on the same policies that was offered by the last Government.
"What the results of the poll are saying is that it is much the same of what they rejected at the polls of the last administration," she said. "A lot of the programmes being rejected are a mere continuation of the PNM's programmes... People voted for this Government because the Government said they had a new vision."
Speaking on the Government's policies, she said the Government had made a lot of errors and had not solved a lot of the existing problems. "People are looking at the more fundamental types of issues like crime, like at issues like the Reshmi affair...That appointment should have been rejected," she said. "In the economy, the growth projection for that was two to three per cent and has been revised downwards by the Central Bank to one to two per cent.
"The decline in crime has not been significant enough to live people sense of safety." People in general have been let down by the Government, she lamented. "I am saying, based on the polls, people are dissatisfied, not because they expected immediate turnaround and for the Government to wave a magic wand, but people expected to see clear signs of a new direction, new policies and programmes and a general sense of where we going as a country," she said.
