The furore sur­round­ing the un­for­tu­nate com­ments by Miss World T&T con­tes­tant Jea­nine Brandt is war­rant­ed as it shows that, at best, she has no idea of T&T’s pover­ty lev­els, its in­sti­tu­tions and the bil­lions of tax­pay­ers dol­lars spent to pro­tect the most vul­ner­a­ble in the so­ci­ety.

I am hap­py she has apol­o­gised af­ter fac­ing mount­ing pres­sure from cit­i­zens who could not coun­te­nance the coun­try she de­scribed; one of thou­sands of chil­dren not know­ing where their next meal was com­ing from, or who are sleep­ing on cold floors and had no ac­cess to health­care.

She ap­peared to for­get that pub­lic health­care in T&T does not come with a cost to the user and chil­dren are al­ways con­sid­ered a pri­or­i­ty in the health­care sys­tem.

More than that, there are school feed­ing pro­grammes, food cards and dif­fer­ent pover­ty al­le­vi­at­ing grants. While by no means am I sug­gest­ing this is a panacea, to make it out, that one of the rich­est coun­tries in the West­ern Hemi­sphere has thou­sands of chil­dren go­ing hun­gry and sleep­ing on the floor is un­for­tu­nate.

What is al­so wor­ri­some is that there are many, who like Ms Brandt, seem to share a sim­i­lar view or if we are to judge by some so­cial me­dia post­ings, at least try to ex­cuse away her com­ments.

Ms Brandt’s com­ments and the re­spons­es are symp­to­matic of the ma­jor chal­lenge that the coun­try faces. This is a coun­try that is so strat­i­fied, is bro­ken in­to so many parts that both its man­age­ment and its abil­i­ty to move in one di­rec­tion are very dif­fi­cult.

The late great Prof Lloyd Braith­waite iden­ti­fied the chal­lenges of this so­ci­ety. Its plu­ral­i­ty that should be its strength, but which has been used as a source of di­vi­sive­ness and pre­vents us from mov­ing for­ward.

As the late Lloyd Best once said, there ap­pear to be no first-class cit­i­zens in T&T. Every sec­tion of the pop­u­la­tion feels it­self sec­ond-class, fight­ing to be ac­cept­ed.

We must not pre­tend. The re­al­i­ty is that there is a large group of peo­ple in the coun­try who feel when the par­ty they do not sup­port is in pow­er, that those in charge are a group of thieves whose on­ly in­tent is to build gen­er­a­tional wealth on the backs of tax­pay­ers.

There is an­oth­er large group of peo­ple who feel when their par­ty is not in pow­er the oth­er side is a group of in­com­pe­tent peo­ple who don’t know any­thing about run­ning busi­ness­es or man­ag­ing mon­ey. They see that group of peo­ple as un­able to man­age the coun­try and are on­ly in­tent on tak­ing their mon­ey to give to their lazy sup­port­ers who are un­will­ing or un­able to earn a liv­ing on their own.

Then there is To­ba­go which does not see it­self as one coun­try with Trinidad but rather its own is­land in an un­easy re­la­tion­ship with an­oth­er is­land that it nev­er asked for and which it feels un­done by.

This is the state of play in the coun­try and it re­quires high-qual­i­ty lead­er­ship to cre­ate a vi­sion that will lead us for­ward.

In times of plen­ty this di­vi­sion has been pa­pered over as there has been enough for those at the ta­ble and oth­ers at the side of the ta­ble to con­sume to their heart’s de­light, but in times of less, the noise of sep­a­ra­tion grows loud­er.

The tragedy of all that I have de­scribed is that this does not have to be so. T&T is not a poor coun­try.

This coun­try’s econ­o­my is al­most twice the size of Ja­maica with half its pop­u­la­tion and phys­i­cal size. It is sev­er­al times the size of Guyana’s econ­o­my.

Its in­fra­struc­ture is sig­nif­i­cant­ly su­pe­ri­or to oth­ers in the re­gion. T&T has a world-class oil and gas basin. In case we for­get, just re­cent­ly Ry­der Scott showed that as a coun­try we have pro­duced 29 tril­lion cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas and in what we can say are al­ready dis­cov­ered re­serves, well over 21 tril­lion cu­bic feet left.

This gives us a basin of at least 50 tcf of gas and a re­al pos­si­bil­i­ty that the T&T basin is clos­er to 100 tcf of gas. That is a gi­ant, world-class basin. You add sev­er­al bil­lion bar­rels of oil, from tar sands, to heavy crude, to light sweet, we have been blessed as an en­er­gy econ­o­my.

This coun­try is one of the largest ex­porters of am­mo­nia and methanol in the world, the largest ex­porter of urea to the Unit­ed States, still one of the top ten ex­porters of liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas in the world.

We have the largest and strongest fi­nan­cial sec­tor in the re­gion. Our man­u­fac­tur­ers con­tin­ue to dom­i­nate Cari­com. We spend more mon­ey per capi­ta on health­care and ed­u­ca­tion than most in the re­gion. T&T is a place with re­al pos­si­bil­i­ties.

But there are chal­lenges of lead­er­ship, par­tic­u­lar­ly at the po­lit­i­cal lev­el, that have per­vad­ed the en­tire so­ci­ety.

The po­lit­i­cal sys­tem makes peo­ple en­e­mies if they are of oth­er po­lit­i­cal per­sua­sions. This robs the coun­try of ac­cess to the best and most tal­ent­ed and it makes many un­will­ing to serve, even when they have a lot to of­fer.

The coun­try has a lim­it­ed tal­ent pool and un­like the UK or the US it is not easy to re­place high­ly qual­i­fied peo­ple.

An­oth­er chal­lenge of the lead­er­ship vac­u­um in T&T is the ze­ro-sum pol­i­tics played in the coun­try. There can be no good rea­son that we did not get a rev­enue au­thor­i­ty with the kind of teeth need­ed, there is no good rea­son we are not hav­ing the en­tire pro­cure­ment leg­is­la­tion im­ple­ment­ed, there is no good rea­son we are with­out a sub­stan­tive Po­lice Com­mis­sion­er.

As a coun­try, this is not the time to pan­ic. We need to be smart about how we utilise our re­sources and have a re­al plan, with tar­gets on mov­ing the econ­o­my for­ward. The time for the po­lit­i­cal games needs to end. There will be elec­tions in a few years and the coun­try will make de­ci­sions.

What we need is to de­mand val­ue for mon­ey. Projects must be ex­e­cut­ed on time and with­in bud­get. The waste and cor­rup­tion at many in­sti­tu­tions, in­clud­ing state en­ti­ties, must be brought to an end.

The coun­try cut over $10 bil­lion, main­ly in fat, some of it in de­fer­ring pay­ments, we can do more if we clean up the waste and cor­rup­tion.

More peo­ple and busi­ness­es must be made to meet their statu­to­ry re­quire­ments and the con­stant apol­o­gists who know that the bur­den is be­ing car­ried by too few, need to stop mak­ing ex­cus­es. No one likes to pay tax­es and there is nev­er a good time to im­ple­ment tax­es.

Most of all, the coun­try must know where it is head­ing and the plan to get us there. This re­mains a fail­ing of the Kei­th Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion which for al­most sev­en years has not shown an abil­i­ty to put for­ward a strat­e­gy to lead us to a bet­ter eco­nom­ic fu­ture.

Project an­nounce­ments do not make pol­i­cy.