At Tues­day’s sod-turn­ing cer­e­mo­ny for Nu­trim­ix’s An­i­mal Feed and Pet Food plant on the Point Lisas In­dus­tri­al Es­tate, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley ex­pressed con­cern about the slow pace of reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals for ma­jor in­vest­ments in T&T.

He lament­ed that T&T seemed to spe­cialise in de­lays and ob­struc­tion, giv­ing the im­pres­sion that some en­ti­ties are more con­cerned with process­es than out­comes.

“I have seen projects in Grena­da and St Vin­cent move at an alarm­ing speed with­out dam­ag­ing their coun­tries and with­out their pop­u­la­tions be­liev­ing that every­one in­volved in the project is a scamp. And there­fore, you have to know every page, every day, every hour, and every minute.”

Dr Row­ley warned that T&T risks miss­ing out on in­vest­ments flow­ing in­to oth­er Cari­com ter­ri­to­ries.

“If we do not have these kinds of in­vest­ments, if we do not have the vi­sion and be­lief that our coun­try can ab­sorb these in­vest­ments, or if we are re­quired to make them on­ly in tra­di­tion­al sec­tors, and we fo­cus sole­ly on what is wrong with this coun­try in­stead of what is good, then we will al­ways be look­ing at what is hap­pen­ing in Bar­ba­dos, in Ja­maica, and now in Grena­da and St Vin­cent.”

Re­fer­ring to the San­dals project in St Vin­cent and the Grenadines, he said it moved from plan­ning to com­ple­tion and op­er­a­tion in the same time­frame that T&T spent dis­cussing ap­provals for a ho­tel.

“And now that the San­dals project is well un­der­way, I can­not stop hear­ing (St Vin­cent’s Prime Min­is­ter) Dr Ralph Gon­salves in my ear, talk­ing about how won­der­ful it has been for the econ­o­my of St Vin­cent. They are about to em­bark on an­oth­er $250 mil­lion ex­pan­sion of that project, while we are still dis­cussing the ap­provals process in To­ba­go.”

1) It must be said that the pace of bu­reau­crat­ic ap­provals in T&T has been slow for decades. De­spite the im­prove­ments that have been made in the Ease of Do­ing Busi­ness, this still re­mains a work in progress.

But Dr Row­ley has been prime min­is­ter of this coun­try for nine years and five months. And he has served the peo­ple of this coun­try in var­i­ous ca­pac­i­ties for near­ly 38 years. On his way out of of­fice, in one of his last pub­lic speech­es, it is in­ter­est­ing that he would use Tues­day’s sod-turn­ing cer­e­mo­ny to ad­dress an is­sue that he should have been giv­en front-burn­er at­ten­tion in the first three months of his stew­ard­ship.

As prime min­is­ter, what has Dr Row­ley done to ad­dress the is­sue of the pace of reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals in his term of of­fice?

2) The prime min­is­ter is clear­ly peev­ed that St Vin­cent and the Grenadines Prime Min­is­ter Ralph Gon­salves was able to go from first talk­ing to San­dals to hav­ing a ho­tel in his coun­try in less than four years. I re­call Dr Row­ley speak­ing at a func­tion at the Hy­att Re­gency with­in a few months of be­ing elect­ed as prime min­is­ter (it was ei­ther the T&T Cham­ber or a T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion event), when he dis­closed that he had talked to Gor­don “Butch” Stew­art about bring­ing his suc­cess­ful re­sort brand, San­dals, to To­ba­go. That would have been 2015.

In my view, the main cause of the San­dals de­ba­cle was the lack of due process in se­lect­ing the com­pa­ny as the brand for a 750-room re­sort. It was clear that the Gov­ern­ment’s ini­tial think­ing on the San­dals re­sort in To­ba­go was to repli­cate the Hilton and Hy­att mod­els. That would have meant the Gov­ern­ment con­struct­ing and own­ing the ho­tel, which would have been lo­cat­ed on state-owned land that was ac­quired from Cli­co.

If the Gov­ern­ment owned the land on which it was pro­posed the re­sort would have been built AND the Gov­ern­ment was go­ing to un­der­take the cost of con­struct­ing the ho­tel, the most San­dals should have re­ceived was a fee for the use of its brand. For the Gov­ern­ment to have signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing with San­dals that pro­vid­ed the Ja­maican-fam­i­ly owned com­pa­ny with tax and du­ty con­ces­sions for decades would have been a hard pill for any pa­tri­ot to swal­low.

Giv­en the avail­abil­i­ty and then ac­qui­si­tion of the land, it would have been more ap­pro­pri­ate for the Gov­ern­ment to is­sue an in­ter­na­tion­al re­quest for pro­pos­als and base its choice of a brand for the site in To­ba­go on the best pro­pos­al re­ceived.

3) The San­dals To­ba­go con­cept failed be­cause it was ini­tial­ly shroud­ed in a veil of opac­i­ty, with no dis­clo­sure about the process used to se­lect San­dals, the cost/ben­e­fit analy­sis of the mod­el or the tax con­ces­sions the Gov­ern­ment was pre­pared to grant Butch Stew­art.

4) What has be­come of the one-stop shop for in­vest­ment projects that has been talked about in this coun­try for decades. T&T has had the Tourism and In­dus­tri­al De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny (Tid­co), which was es­tab­lished in 1997, with part of its role be­ing to serve as a one-stop shop to fast-track in­vest­ments. In 2012, In­vesTT was es­tab­lished to do the same thing. The fact that Shameer “Ron­nie” Mo­hammed, the chair­man of the Nu­trim­ix group of com­pa­nies, could use the sod-turn­ing cer­e­mo­ny for his new $150 mil­lion an­i­mal feed and pet food project to vent about the slow pace of some of the reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals, is an in­di­ca­tion that if T&T has a one-stop shop for projects like that, it is not work­ing.

5) In June last year, Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley launched a blis­ter­ing at­tack on a few en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists who had spo­ken out against the con­struc­tion of a ho­tel and vil­la project at Rocky Point in To­ba­go.

Speak­ing at a post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence, the prime min­is­ter said To­ba­go would not be­come a prop­er tourism des­ti­na­tion “with­out a sig­nif­i­cant in­crease in high-qual­i­ty ho­tel rooms.”

Ask­ing the rhetor­i­cal ques­tion, who is go­ing to build the high-qual­i­ty ho­tel rooms, he said while the Gov­ern­ment had built the Hilton and the Hy­att Re­gency in Trinidad, and the Mag­dale­na Ho­tel in To­ba­go, “even if we want to build an­oth­er ho­tel now, we don’t have the mon­ey. So the Gov­ern­ment’s pol­i­cy now is we look to the pri­vate sec­tor.”

In or­der to dri­ve the de­vel­op­ment of tourism in To­ba­go, he said his ad­min­is­tra­tion had at­tempt­ed to en­cour­age Ja­maica’s San­dals group to con­sid­er the de­vel­op­ment of a ho­tel in To­ba­go.

He crit­i­cised a dai­ly news­pa­per “and a hand­ful of name­less, face­less peo­ple” for at­tack­ing the San­dals project on en­vi­ron­men­tal grounds “with two pages every week­end.”

The prime min­is­ter was al­so crit­i­cal of “well-fi­nanced idlers who spend their days telling you that be­cause their par­ents were good enough to send them to the best schools...and who don’t have to wor­ry about their next meal be­cause their trust fund is good.” Dr Row­ley said those op­po­nents of the project spend their time surf­ing “and go and smoke their mar­i­jua­na there and med­i­tate to your God.”

In­sist­ing that he will stand in sup­port of the ho­tel, as long as it meets the en­vi­ron­men­tal rules, Dr Row­ley said: “I as prime min­is­ter of Trinidad and To­ba­go will move heav­en and earth to make sure the ho­tel is built at Rocky Point be­cause there are To­bag­o­ni­ans who have no trust fund and who are wait­ing for a meal. There are farm­ers wait­ing for a mar­ket...”

One won­ders if Dr Row­ley has main­tained an in­ter­est in the Rock Point de­vel­op­ment and if Mr John Aboud, a ho­tel de­vel­op­er, has suf­fered from slow reg­u­la­to­ry ap­provals?