In the last five weeks, two of T&T’s longest-serv­ing Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment, Fitzger­ald Hinds and Dr Kei­th Row­ley, have an­nounced that 2025 will be their last year rep­re­sent­ing their con­stituents.

On No­vem­ber 30, 2024, Mr Hinds, who cur­rent­ly serves as Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, con­firmed he would not be seek­ing re-elec­tion as Laven­tille West MP. First elect­ed to Par­lia­ment in 1995, this year would be his 30th year in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives.

Last Fri­day in To­ba­go, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley said he will not con­test the next gen­er­al elec­tion, due to be held this year, and that he plans to step down as prime min­is­ter be­fore the end of his cur­rent term.

The third mem­ber of the rul­ing Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment’s 30-year club is Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert, who was first elect­ed as the Diego Mar­tin North/East MP in 1991, along­side Dr Row­ley.

Mr Im­bert served as act­ing prime min­is­ter on every oc­ca­sion that Dr Row­ley was out of T&T, from Sep­tem­ber 2015 to Ju­ly 2024. But at the end of Ju­ly last year, the PM chose Min­is­ter of En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries, Stu­art Young, to act for him and Young has act­ed as prime min­is­ter on three oc­ca­sions af­ter that.

As act­ing prime min­is­ter for close to nine years, the op­tics seemed to in­di­cate that Mr Im­bert was be­ing po­si­tioned to suc­ceed Dr Row­ley as PNM po­lit­i­cal leader. It is now clear he has been re­placed as Dr Row­ley’s po­ten­tial suc­ces­sor by Mr Young.

The ques­tion is whether T&T’s longest serv­ing min­is­ter of fi­nance would choose to stay on in Par­lia­ment, giv­en PM Row­ley’s sig­nal that he is leav­ing pol­i­tics in the next nine months.

At a vir­tu­al news con­fer­ence on No­vem­ber 5, 2024, Mr Im­bert was asked whether the 2025 bud­get was his swan song.

His re­sponse was, “I said that in my wrap-up of the bud­get speech. I will re­peat what I said: “This was my tenth bud­get and I will be back for my eleventh bud­get.”

Mr Im­bert’s con­fi­dence last year that the PNM will be re-elect­ed to of­fice in the up­com­ing gen­er­al elec­tion and that he would be asked to stay on as fi­nance min­is­ter are in­ter­est­ing and note­wor­thy. It sug­gests he rates his per­for­mance as the man steer­ing the do­mes­tic econ­o­my high­ly.

But as Mr Im­bert him­self would ac­knowl­edge, T&T has re­port­ed fis­cal deficits in nine of the ten bud­gets he has de­liv­ered.

And while he was se­lect­ed to head the fi­nance min­istry in Sep­tem­ber 2015, when T&T’s rev­enues from the en­er­gy sec­tor were in de­cline, there is no doubt that he and his par­lia­men­tary col­leagues could have done much more to pro­mote in­vest­ment in the non-en­er­gy sec­tor, which would have di­ver­si­fied the coun­try’s rev­enues away from its over­ar­ch­ing de­pen­dence on en­er­gy rev­enues.

Mr Im­bert’s un­doubt­ed suc­cess at keep­ing T&T’s in­fla­tion rate be­low one per cent for more than a year, must be weighed against his less-than-stel­lar han­dling of the coun­try’s forex sit­u­a­tion and the promis­es he made in Sep­tem­ber 2023 to re­solve the forex is­sues fac­ing SMEs with­in six months.

There is no doubt, though, that his out­stand­ing lega­cy has been the for­mu­la­tion and roll-out of the Na­tion­al In­vest­ment Fund, which gave thou­sands of T&T res­i­dents the pos­si­bil­i­ty of earn­ing high rates of re­turn.