Cur­tis Williams

Are we as a so­ci­ety as­pi­ra­tional? Do we think that T&T could one day emerge from its present state and be what the late Prime Min­is­ter Dr Er­ic Williams called a mod­el na­tion?

To do that I feel re­quires a shift in cul­ture that must start with av­er­age cit­i­zens de­mand­ing that we want bet­ter for our­selves, that we are not pre­pared to set­tle for things that we know are un­ac­cept­able and that we must hold all in lead­er­ship roles to ac­count. No­tice I said all. Not just politi­cians.

There must be a burn­ing de­sire for jus­tice, for ac­count­abil­i­ty and for high qual­i­ty per­for­mance.

I will ad­mit that this is a tall or­der, if not a near im­pos­si­ble task, be­cause it would re­quire the over­throw of a sys­tem de­signed to al­low for some to prof­it at the ex­pense of the great ma­jor­i­ty of oth­ers.

Every­where we turn there is strong ev­i­dence of this and for many the bur­den is so much that the al­ter­na­tive is to shrug one’s shoul­der and move on and, in some cas­es, mi­grate away from the prob­lems.

Let us take health­care for ex­am­ple. I read with great in­ter­est the de­mand by Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh that Guardian colum­nist Ira Math­ur pro­duce ev­i­dence of peo­ple wait­ing be­tween one to three days for a bed at the pub­lic hos­pi­tals.

That the Min­is­ter of Health could so brazen­ly pre­tend he does not know this to be true shows he is ei­ther out of touch with his port­fo­lio or he prefers to plead the fifth rather than con­front a prob­lem that cit­i­zens, or­di­nary cit­i­zens, should not come to ac­cept as the way it is in the pub­lic health­care sys­tem, but rather that we are not will­ing to have a sys­tem that treats cit­i­zens in this way, at their most vul­ner­a­ble mo­ments.

Health­care is ex­pen­sive and the gov­ern­ment can­not on its own af­ford a first-class health­care sys­tem with­out the as­sis­tance of its cit­i­zens. It can­not pay for it from the trea­sury and must have some kind of health in­sur­ance sys­tem that will re­move some of the bur­den from the trea­sury. The gov­ern­ment knows this. They have the stud­ies, they have heard and know of Pro­fes­sor Karl Theodore’s work, but they will not im­ple­ment it. To do so would re­quire ex­pend­ing po­lit­i­cal cap­i­tal, a wean­ing of the so­ci­ety from the no­tion that health­care is free or that health sur­charge is a re­al tax for health­care.

The pro­vide an ef­fi­cient pub­lic health sys­tem will hurt the pock­ets of some of the pri­vate health in­sti­tu­tions. Stud­ies have shown that over $5 bil­lion is spent an­nu­al­ly in the pri­vate health sec­tor, one of the true growth ar­eas in a time of eco­nom­ic con­trac­tion.

Yes the pri­vate sec­tor ben­e­fits from the present sys­tem that tells you it is okay to wait years for some surg­eries or vis­it the doc­tors in their pri­vate prac­tice since the ur­gency is not there in the pub­lic sec­tor. In oth­er words, the will­ing­ness to ac­cept the sys­tem is what it is, will not lead to change and would like­ly leave us worse off over time.

This is no dif­fer­ent with the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty. That WASA con­tin­ues to lose over 50 per cent of its wa­ter in 2021 when in 1993 the late Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning made the same ob­ser­va­tion while invit­ing Sev­ern Trent to pro­vide man­age­ment sup­port to the au­thor­i­ty. This is an ex­am­ple of what I am speak­ing of.

Al­most three decades lat­er, bil­lions of dol­lars spent and we have lit­tle net im­prove­ment to show for it. But we con­tin­ue to ac­cept that wa­ter two days a week is okay, truck borne wa­ter can work and it does not lead the pub­lic to de­mand bet­ter. It is not seen as a na­tion­al pri­or­i­ty the way we ap­pear to have as a na­tion­al pri­or­i­ty the con­struc­tion of high­ways.

I am not in any­way knock­ing high­way con­struc­tion, I think it can po­ten­tial­ly lead to eco­nom­ic ex­pan­sion as it im­proves con­nec­tiv­i­ty among com­mu­ni­ties, im­proves ef­fi­cien­cy and re­duces time on the road. It al­so makes it eas­i­er to get to com­mu­ni­ties not lo­cat­ed close to the main towns and may al­low peo­ple to live fur­ther away from the town and cities and still keep their jobs. But is there not some­thing wrong with the con­stant need to pave and repave the na­tion’s roads which by the ad­mis­sion of the Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan are in poor con­di­tion?

Is it our imag­i­na­tion that roads should last be­tween ten and 15 years be­fore hav­ing to be repaved? Is the prob­lem on­ly WASA, is it poor con­struc­tion with a lack of drainage? What does it say about our con­trac­tors or en­gi­neer­ing? What does it say about how we val­ue our tax­pay­ers dol­lars? In short are we hav­ing the right kind of con­ver­sa­tions as a coun­try? Are we as­pir­ing to hav­ing a first class coun­try, where we don’t have to fo­cus so much on the next pot­hole and could pay more at­ten­tion to the rest of road users?

It is the same ques­tion I ask about the time the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance is pre­pared to spend on Twit­ter try­ing to pre­tend that the Moody’s down­grade should not be fo­cused on by the me­dia and oth­ers be­cause the IMF is pre­dict­ing growth of over five per cent in the next fis­cal year.

If the Min­is­ter is hon­est and if we were hav­ing se­ri­ous dis­cus­sions he would ad­mit that both the IMF and Moody’s point to an econ­o­my al­most com­plete­ly re­liant on en­er­gy prices and pro­duc­tion. An econ­o­my that has se­ri­ous down­side risks and one that he has failed over six years to di­ver­si­fy.

Both Moody’s and the IMF recog­nise that the coun­try’s forex po­si­tion has to be ad­just­ed and that the stance of seek­ing to de­fend the TT dol­lar at all cost is not sus­tain­able.

What we must be dis­cussing is how do we tru­ly di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my. We must build on the pos­i­tive moves be­ing made in the Tourism and Agri­cul­ture sec­tors. We must not take our eyes off fix­ing the en­er­gy sec­tor in­clud­ing bold moves like the one made to get the Man­a­tee field go­ing. We must de­mand ac­count­abil­i­ty. We must de­mand a re­turn to plans and tar­gets in the way we man­age the coun­try’s econ­o­my.

We must de­mand bet­ter!