The 2026 Mid-Year Bud­get Re­view, pre­sent­ed on Mon­day, was framed as a con­fi­dent de­c­la­ra­tion that Trinidad and To­ba­go has turned a fis­cal cor­ner. Fi­nance Min­is­ter Dav­en­dranath Tan­coo point­ed to a nar­row­er deficit, stronger rev­enues, re­newed in­vestor con­fi­dence and a Gov­ern­ment in­tent on “pro­tect­ing the peo­ple” while mod­ernising the State.

The 2026 Mid-Year Bud­get Re­view is as much a po­lit­i­cal doc­u­ment as it is a fis­cal up­date, pre­sent­ed by a gov­ern­ment ea­ger to demon­strate that, af­ter one year in of­fice, it has be­gun to re­verse eco­nom­ic de­cline, re­store con­fi­dence and re­build State in­sti­tu­tions.

“The sor­row for the dead is the on­ly sor­row from which we refuse to be di­vorced. Every oth­er wound we seek to heal, every oth­er af­flic­tion to for­get; but this wound we con­sid­er it a du­ty to keep open; this af­flic­tion we cher­ish and brood over in soli­tude” Wash­ing­ton Irv­ing (1783-1859).

The po­lit­i­cal ha­rangue among Mem­bers of Par­lia­ment dur­ing last Fri­day night’s Fi­nance Stand­ing Com­mit­tee meet­ing re­flects a trou­bling es­ca­la­tion in ten­sions be­tween the rul­ing Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) Gov­ern­ment and the Op­po­si­tion Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM).

The last time Trinidad and To­ba­go qual­i­fied for a world cup, 2006 in Ger­many, I went to all of their match­es – in­clud­ing the last one in Kaiser­slautern, a small town close to France and be­hind God back, as we say.

Trinidad and To­ba­go has faced a trou­bled eco­nom­ic out­look since 2014, when en­er­gy prices de­clined. The twin pri­or­i­ties since then have been, first, to ad­dress crime and the na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty sit­u­a­tion, and sec­ond, to put the econ­o­my on a sol­id foun­da­tion to lim­it the ef­fects of volatil­i­ty in the en­er­gy sec­tor. Thank­ful­ly, the coun­try has not suf­fered a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter. How­ev­er, like most coun­tries, we had to al­lo­cate ad­di­tion­al re­sources to ad­dress the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, which in­creased our debt bur­den.

It was in­evitable that se­cu­ri­ty, the State of Emer­gency - and Gov­ern­ment ver­sus Op­po­si­tion bick­er­ing—would have arisen at Par­lia­ment’s Stand­ing Fi­nance Com­mit­tee meet­ing yes­ter­day.

Trinidad and To­ba­go’s crime prob­lem has claimed lives, shat­tered fam­i­lies, desta­bilised com­mu­ni­ties and un­der­mined pub­lic con­fi­dence in the abil­i­ty of the State to pro­vide se­cu­ri­ty. In the face of such a cri­sis, po­lit­i­cal point-scor­ing is a lux­u­ry this coun­try can no longer af­ford.

On Wednes­day, At­tor­ney Gen­er­al John Je­re­mie, while pi­lot­ing the mo­tion to ex­tend the State of Emer­gency (SoE) for a fur­ther three months, chose to tar­get a mi­nor­i­ty group whose en­ter­prise and dis­ci­pline over gen­er­a­tions have en­abled it to ac­cu­mu­late wealth.

The Di­rec­tor of the Pol­i­cy and Com­mu­ni­ty Sup­port Of­fice (PAC­SO), at­tor­ney Za­heer Ali, has been tasked with al­le­vi­at­ing some of the is­sues plagu­ing our com­mu­ni­ties. He heads this spe­cialised unit un­der the Min­istry of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty, which fo­cus­es on mul­ti­sec­toral crime pre­ven­tion, youth de­vel­op­ment, psy­choso­cial sup­port and pub­lic safe­ty ini­tia­tives aimed at strength­en­ing vul­ner­a­ble com­mu­ni­ties.

The Gov­ern­ment is liv­ing in per­plex­i­ty. It finds it­self tan­gled in a com­pli­cat­ed sit­u­a­tion and is both con­fused and in a state of be­wil­der­ment. The sit­u­a­tion— eco­nom­ic, fi­nan­cial, on the crime front, and, for the cit­i­zen, in terms of be­ing able to live with­out fear of crime or cope with the cost of ba­sic needs—is pret­ty grim.

In sor­row­ful tri­umph, we pause to ho­n­our two tow­er­ing fig­ures of the steel­pan tra­di­tion — Ster­ling Be­tan­court and Robert “Rob­bie” Greenidge — whose lives and work helped shape one of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s most en­dur­ing na­tion-build­ing achieve­ments.