Kevin Ram­nar­ine

?Patrick Man­ning casts a long shad­ow over the po­lit­i­cal land­scape of T&T. Pri­or to his en­try in­to pol­i­tics he worked as a ge­ol­o­gist at Tex­a­co.

Among the vet­er­ans of the lo­cal oil in­dus­try there are dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the sto­ry of why he left Tex­a­co for the un­pre­dictable world of pol­i­tics. On en­ter­ing elec­toral pol­i­tics in 1971, Mr Man­ning re­placed Ger­ald Mon­tano. It has been sug­gest­ed that this move was a re­sponse by Dr Er­ic Williams to the ag­i­ta­tions of the Black Pow­er Move­ment of 1970.

I was told that in the run-up to the 1976 gen­er­al elec­tion there was an at­tempt to re­place Mr Man­ning with an­oth­er PNM can­di­date. As fate would have it, a del­e­ga­tion of his sup­port­ers met with the then Min­is­ter of Pe­tro­le­um and Mines and MP for San Fer­nan­do West, Er­rol Ma­habir. The del­e­ga­tion lob­bied for Mr Man­ning to be re­tained. They were suc­cess­ful and he was re­turned as the can­di­date for San Fer­nan­do East in 1976. T&T would have been a much dif­fer­ent place if he was re­ject­ed in 1976.

In 1981 af­ter the death of Dr Er­ic Williams, George Cham­bers led the PNM to vic­to­ry at the polls with 26 seats. It was dur­ing the Cham­bers ad­min­is­tra­tion that Mr Man­ning was ap­point­ed as the Min­is­ter of Pe­tro­le­um and Mines. At the age of 35 he re­mains the youngest per­son ever ap­point­ed to that po­si­tion. I know this be­cause I am the sec­ond youngest per­son to have held that port­fo­lio. In 1986 he sur­vived the NAR 33-3 tsuna­mi by on­ly nar­row­ly hold­ing on to his seat. He then went on to re­build the PNM and win the 1991 gen­er­al elec­tion.

In 1991 when he be­came Prime Min­is­ter for the first time, I was an un­der­grad­u­ate stu­dent at the UWI. I re­mem­ber the first Man­ning gov­ern­ment had a cor­po­rate im­age about it which was ab­sent in pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ments. To­geth­er with his Fi­nance Min­is­ter Wen­dell Mot­t­ley, he set out lib­er­al­is­ing the econ­o­my, pri­vatis­ing un­pro­duc­tive State as­sets and prepar­ing T&T for glob­al­i­sa­tion. When he took the de­ci­sion to float the TT dol­lar the prophets of doom pre­dict­ed dis­as­ter and hy­per­in­fla­tion akin to what had hap­pened in Bo­livia in the mid 80s. Dooms­day nev­er came and his de­ci­sion to float the dol­lar was the right one.

In the en­er­gy sec­tor, Mr Man­ning loomed large. His biggest con­tri­bu­tion to the na­tion­al en­er­gy sec­tor came in 1992 when un­der his lead­er­ship a de­ci­sion was made to take T&T in­to the world of liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas. On Ju­ly 20, 1995 At­lantic LNG was formed with share­hold­ers in­clud­ing Cabot of Boston, the NGC, BP and BG. A few months lat­er, in Oc­to­ber 1995, Mr Man­ning would call a snap elec­tion which end­ed in the fa­mous 17-17-2 out­come. Not for the last time, Mr Man­ning gra­cious­ly ac­cept­ed de­feat and head­ed to the Op­po­si­tion bench where he stayed un­til De­cem­ber 2001.

T&T has how­ev­er been known for con­sis­ten­cy of en­er­gy pol­i­cy. With that in mind on June 20, 1996 the new UNC/NAR ad­min­is­tra­tion signed the "LNG Project Agree­ment" with At­lantic LNG. The rest as they say is his­to­ry.

In 1999 LNG ex­ports com­menced from Train I. By 2001 when he was back as Prime Min­is­ter, Trains II and III were al­ready un­der way. He how­ev­er presided over the de­ci­sion to build Train IV which was at one time the largest LNG train in the world.

The sta­tis­tics are im­pres­sive. In 1999 T&T was pro­duc­ing 1.3 bil­lion cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas per day. By 2010 nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion peaked at 4.3 bil­lion cu­bic feet per day. The three-fold in­crease in nat­ur­al gas pro­duc­tion led to a tripling of the size of the econ­o­my from US$6485 per capi­ta in the year 2000 to a peak of US$21,410 per capi­ta in 2008.

A cen­tral ac­tor in that growth sto­ry was BPTT. In­ter­est­ing­ly, Mr Man­ning's lead­er­ship in the en­er­gy sec­tor has been doc­u­ment­ed by for­mer BP CEO Lord John Browne in his book, Sev­en El­e­ments That Have Changed the World. In the book Lord Browne not­ed Mr Man­ning's de­sire to mon­e­tise nat­ur­al gas for the ben­e­fit of the coun­try.

In the lat­ter years of his Prime Min­is­ter­ship he en­vi­sioned alu­mini­um smelters, a gas pipeline from T&T to the East­ern Caribbean and down­stream in­dus­tries that would go be­yond methanol and am­mo­nia to prod­ucts such as poly­eth­yl­ene, polypropy­lene and melamine. Un­der his watch, con­struc­tion start­ed on the 720 megawatt TGU pow­er plant in La Brea. This project was com­plet­ed in 2012 and forms the an­chor for the Union In­dus­tri­al Es­tate.

Mr Man­ning did well for T&T. As far as the en­er­gy sec­tor is con­cerned he al­ways act­ed to place the na­tion­al in­ter­est and the big­ger pic­ture ahead of all else. If to­day we en­joy the best stan­dard of liv­ing in the Caribbean it is be­cause of his de­ci­sions around the mon­eti­sa­tion of our nat­ur­al gas re­sources.

I once re­mem­ber Mr Man­ning say­ing that run­ning T&T wasn't an easy job. Be­com­ing Prime Min­is­ter of this coun­try and per­form­ing in that job is in­deed a Her­culean task. It re­quires that the as­pi­rant make a mas­sive per­son­al sac­ri­fice for which there was no guar­an­tee of suc­cess. Patrick Man­ning made that sac­ri­fice and we thank him for his out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tion.

n Kevin Ram­nar­ine is a for­mer En­er­gy Min­is­ter of T&T