In five days, T&T’s elec­torate gets the op­por­tu­ni­ty to vote to re-elect a po­lit­i­cal par­ty that has man­aged the coun­try’s af­fairs for more than nine-and-a-half years or elect an op­po­si­tion par­ty that has made an un­prece­dent­ed se­ries of promis­es.

As I out­lined in this space on April 4, in a com­men­tary head­lined “Can T&T af­ford Kam­la’s promis­es?” sev­en of the main fi­nan­cial com­mit­ments made by the Op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) on the cam­paign trail could cost the tax­pay­ers of this coun­try more than $18 bil­lion in ad­di­tion­al ex­pen­di­ture or rev­enue fore­gone.

In re­sponse to the UNC promis­es, re­cent­ly in­stalled Prime Min­is­ter Stu­art Young, who leads the rul­ing Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM), has ar­gued that the on­ly way the UNC could fund its elec­tion promis­es is by de­valu­ing the T&T from its cur­rent lev­el of $6.79 to US$1 to $15 to US$1. 

Such a de­val­u­a­tion would mean a dou­bling in the price of al­most every­thing that the pop­u­la­tion con­sumes be­cause most con­sump­tion is based on im­port­ed goods.

Mr Young al­so ar­gues that a UNC vic­to­ry at Mon­day’s polls will re­sult in that par­ty hav­ing to call in the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund, (IMF), which he says will mean thou­sands of jobs lost in the pub­lic ser­vice and the elim­i­na­tion of many of the trans­fers and sub­si­dies that peo­ple in this coun­try be­lieve is their birthright en­ti­tle­ment.

As some­one who has ar­gued since April 2013 that a man­aged flota­tion of the TT dol­lar—which is ab­solute­ly not to be con­fused with a de­val­u­a­tion of the do­mes­tic cur­ren­cy—should be part of this coun­try’s fis­cal ar­se­nal, I do not sup­port the prime min­is­ter on his fear-mon­ger­ing of the val­ue of the TT dol­lar. 

That is be­cause, as I ar­gued in this space last year, the sin­gle largest ben­e­fi­cia­ry of a man­aged flota­tion in a coun­try like ours is the Gov­ern­ment, which col­lects en­er­gy tax rev­enue most­ly in US dol­lars. This is a fact that op­po­nents of a flota­tion stu­dious­ly ig­nore.

But I al­so do not sup­port the UNC’s com­mit­ment to the Pub­lic Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion to raise the salaries of pub­lic ser­vants by a min­i­mum of 10 per cent. That amounts to giv­ing pub­lic ser­vants high­er salaries with one hand, and then tak­ing it back with the oth­er hand in the form of high­er prices for every­thing.

The re­al risk of high­er pub­lic sec­tor salaries is that it would re­sult in sharply high­er in­fla­tion, as many em­ploy­ees will rush out and buy im­port­ed goods with their back­pay. That would al­so mean a sharp in­crease in the de­mand for for­eign ex­change.

Al­so, giv­en the un­cer­tain­ty over the Drag­on gas project, T&T’s fis­cal sit­u­a­tion sim­ply does not al­low the in­com­ing gov­ern­ment to de­liv­er a dou­ble-dig­it wage in­crease to pub­lic ser­vants.  

On the is­sue of a de­val­u­a­tion, if the UNC suc­cess­ful­ly cap­tures the seat of pow­er on Mon­day, UNC chair­man De­ven­dra­dath Tan­coo flat­ly de­nied that pos­si­bil­i­ty at a ral­ly of the op­po­si­tion UNC in Point Fortin on April 9.  

“Read my lips, Stu­art Young, no de­val­u­a­tion un­der the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress. And if you were clos­ing your fridge door and did not hear, let me say it again: no de­val­u­a­tion un­der the Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress.”

He did not re­fer to a man­aged flota­tion or to the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the UNC is go­ing to change the law to al­low greater with­drawals from T&T’s Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund. 

Square­ly ad­dress­ing the is­sue of where the UNC in gov­ern­ment would get the mon­ey to fund more than $18 bil­lion in elec­tion com­mit­ments, Mr Tan­coo said that that is the PNM’s biggest prob­lem.

“Let us start with some ideas of where we are get­ting the mon­ey from. The first place we are go­ing to get the mon­ey from…is to stop the thiev­ing, stop all of the cor­rup­tion, stop all of this rack­et, and it is not on­ly me who is say­ing so, ladies and gen­tle­men. The Of­fice of the Pro­cure­ment Reg­u­la­tor (OPR) is the body set up in the laws of Trinidad and To­ba­go to mon­i­tor and eval­u­ate the op­er­a­tion and the award of con­tracts by state agen­cies.’

“Every time the Gov­ern­ment gives out a con­tract to some­body, the job of the OPR is to take a look at it and make sure that the prop­er pro­ce­dures are fol­lowed, and no cor­rup­tion ex­ists. So for all in­tents and pur­pos­es, the OPR is the an­ti-cor­rup­tion body for Gov­ern­ment con­tracts.

“The OPR has said that in one year, $5 bil­lion in con­tracts un­der this PNM was giv­en out il­le­gal­ly,” to friends, fam­i­ly, and fi­nanciers of the rul­ing par­ty.

He went on to say that over the al­most 10 years that the PNM has been in pow­er, the $5 bil­lion a year amounts to $50 bil­lion.

“So, when you go to the hos­pi­tal and you can’t get a Panadol, $50 bil­lion gone in some­body’s pock­et. It have men who are liv­ing bil­lion dol­lar lifestyles in this coun­try, off your back.”

Mr Tan­coo’s er­rors

There are sev­er­al things wrong with Mr Tan­coo’s analy­sis of what the OPR ac­tu­al­ly stat­ed.

1) The OPR did not re­fer to con­tracts be­ing grant­ed as a re­sult of cor­rup­tion and rack­ets. The pro­cure­ment reg­u­la­tor, in the ex­ec­u­tive sum­ma­ry of its an­nu­al re­port for the pe­ri­od April 2023 to April 2024, re­ferred to “the ex­ces­sive use of lim­it­ed and non-com­pet­i­tive pro­cure­ment meth­ods.” 

The use of a non-com­pet­i­tive pro­cure­ment method does not nec­es­sar­i­ly equate to a cor­rupt process, as there are sev­er­al le­git­i­mate rea­sons that ex­plain such a process. And nei­ther does a com­pet­i­tive process al­ways re­sult in a fair out­come, as in­di­cat­ed by the on­go­ing case in­volv­ing the Es­tate Man­age­ment and Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny;

The OPR al­so did not re­fer to $5 bil­lion in ques­tion­able con­tracts. In the four quar­ters be­tween Ju­ly 1 2023 and June 30, 2024, the pro­cure­ment reg­u­la­tor iden­ti­fied $4.86 bil­lion in con­tracts is­sued with lim­it­ed and non-com­pet­i­tive pro­cure­ment meth­ods. Ac­cord­ing to the OPR’s an­nu­al re­port, “The tenet of com­pe­ti­tion re­in­forces the found­ing prin­ci­ples of fair­ness, eq­ui­ty and val­ue for mon­ey en­shrined in the Act. Notwith­stand­ing the new pub­lic pro­cure­ment regime es­tab­lished open bid­ding as the de­fault pro­cure­ment method, the Of­fice ob­served an ex­ces­sive use of lim­it­ed and non-com­pet­i­tive pro­cure­ment meth­ods, with con­sid­er­able in­creas­es as the re­port­ing quar­ters pro­gressed;

As the OPR re­ferred to a spe­cif­ic pe­ri­od, it is dif­fi­cult to ex­trap­o­late to a pe­ri­od of 10 years, as the Pub­lic Pro­cure­ment and Dis­pos­al of Pub­lic Prop­er­ty did not ex­ist for most of that pe­ri­od.

Mr Tan­co al­so spoke about di­ver­si­fy­ing the rev­enue base on ex­ist­ing in­dus­tries.

“Cre­ate the en­vi­ron­ment so peo­ple want to in­vest more,” he said.

Re­al is­sue

The choice that the vot­ing pop­u­la­tion has to make is which vi­sion for the coun­try’s fu­ture do you be­lieve best suits your per­son­al in­ter­est. 

Do you want pol­i­cy con­tin­u­a­tion or pol­i­cy change?

Let me throw in here that al­though Tri­nis like free­ness and to know that they are get­ting their share of the eco­nom­ic pie, in 2015, the PNM was elect­ed de­spite the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship de­liv­er­ing a 14 per cent wage hike for pub­lic ser­vants in ear­ly 2015.

Would this time be dif­fer­ent?