I can­not un­der­stand why our lead­ers in­sist on play­ing games with our mon­ey. If I am not mis­tak­en, Petrotrin has just com­plet­ed (or is about to com­plete) a mas­sive up­grade. This up­grade was bud­get­ed at $2.2 bil­lion (US$350 mil­lion). The last fig­ure I am aware of as the fi­nal cost is ap­prox­i­mate­ly $8.2 bil­lion (US$1.3 mil­lion), a cost over­run of around $6 bil­lion. The rea­son giv­en for this was "an unan­tic­i­pat­ed ex­pan­sion in the scope of works, in­creas­es in con­struc­tion costs, and de­lays due to fi­nanc­ing and the avail­abil­i­ty of ex­per­tise and ma­te­ri­als dur­ing con­struc­tion."

I am com­plete­ly con­fused. How can we have an ex­pand­ed scope up­grade that is 375 per cent over bud­get and not have ad­e­quate on-site elec­tri­cal back­up?

In to­day's world of con­tin­gency mea­sures and busi­ness con­tin­u­a­tion plan­ning, just about every medi­um to large en­ter­prise has back-up elec­tric­i­ty. I mean, even the par­lour-gro­cery by the cor­ner has a gen­er­a­tor, and Petrotrin does not have enough on-site ca­pac­i­ty to con­tin­ue op­er­a­tions? To make mat­ters worse, it is in a sim­i­lar po­si­tion as re­gards wa­ter sup­ply. As a tax­pay­er I would re­al­ly like to how my mon­ey has been used. This is a to­tal­ly un­ac­cept­able state of af­fairs, for which peo­ple must be held ac­count­able.

It is im­per­a­tive that the new Gov­ern­ment gets some an­swers from the last ad­min­is­tra­tion, prefer­ably in short or­der. There must be a good ex­pla­na­tion, there just has to be, for our main en­er­gy com­pa­ny not to have back-up en­er­gy. Keep in mind that oth­er coun­tries al­so de­pend on Petrotrin for sup­plies. Some­times I think it will be bet­ter that par­lia­men­tar­i­ans go in on Tues­days and Fri­days in sport uni­forms car­ry­ing foot­balls made of mon­ey and play in front of our eyes, rather than in busi­ness at­tire and try to give the im­pres­sion that they are se­ri­ous about run­ning our coun­try.

Michael Wal­cott

Via e-mail